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Perot, to be sure, boasts a formidable asset: a political-bull detector that can cut through the fog of Washington-style obfuscation. His one-liners can be devastating. On the budget: "The chief financial officer of a publicly owned corporation would be sent to prison if he kept books like our government." On the gulf war: "Only in America would you have a war, get it over with and have all the heroes either be generals or politicians." He also deserves credit for taking stands that run counter to the timorous can't-tell-the-truth-to-the-people philosophy of both parties. He favors means testing for both Social Security and Medicare because he believes it indefensible for someone as rich as himself to get government benefits at a time of $400 billion deficits. He is justly irate over the systemic corruption in Washington, as former officials cash in a few years of public service for lucrative careers as lobbyists for corporate or even foreign interests.
Yet some of Perot's ideas border on the demagogic. He advocates a constitutional amendment to bar Congress from raising taxes without a vote of ^ the people, even though this would make it even tougher to reduce the deficit than Bush's read-my-lips, no-tax pledge. Perot is entranced with the idea of electronic town meetings to divine the will of the people on complex issues like health care. Again and again, he comes back to this high-tech gimmick as a touchstone of a Perot presidency. "With interactive television every other week," he says, "we could take one major issue, go to the American people, cover it in great detail, have them respond, and show by congressional district what the people want."
This potentially smacks of plebiscite democracy. TV call-in polls are about as representative as trying to gauge the mood of the country by listening to talk radio. As James Fishkin, chairman of the government department at the University of Texas, argues, "Electronic town meetings are just a device to step outside established political mechanisms -- to abandon traditional forms of representation and elections -- in order to acquire a mantle of higher legitimacy. And in the very worst case, it could be invoked toward extraconstitutional ends."
But for the moment the big question is, Can Perot stand the heat necessary to get to the kitchen? Despite more than 20 years in the public eye (dating back to his unsuccessful 1969 crusade to send Christmas packages to American POWS in North Vietnam), Perot has never endured the media scrutiny that comes with a modern presidential campaign. Up to now, he has largely sculpted his own Horatio-Alger-hero-with-a-heart-of-gold image -- most notably by fostering On Wings of Eagles, Ken Follett's breathless account of a Perot-sponsored 1979 private commando raid to free two employees trapped in an Iranian jail at the height of the Khomeini revolution. A longtime aide questions whether Perot can handle media coverage that he can't control: "He's used to talking to business reporters. I don't believe Ross is going to put up with it." Perot, of course, will have no choice. For, as James Carville, a top adviser to Clinton, puts it, "If he gets through what he's about to be put through, maybe he deserves to be President."