The Return of Ross Perot

--> Henry Srebrnik [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Even though Donald Trump has effectively claimed the Republican Party nomination for president, for much of the party’s elders and donors, his victory is still being treated as a hostile takeover.

Neither George H.W. Bush nor his son George W. , the last two Republican presidents, will be endorsing Trump, and the last two Republican presidential candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney, will not be coming to the Cleveland convention in July.

House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, said that he could not support Trump until the New York businessman changes his tone and demonstrates that he shares the party’s values.

Trump will be getting so little help from establishment Republicans that he will in effect be running as the equivalent of a third party candidate.

Maybe that’s as it should be, because his political forebears are not the previous Republican presidents, the two Bushes and Ronald Reagan, but Ross Perot, who ran as a third party candidate in 1992 – and whose politics in many ways mirrored those of Trump.

Perot was the billionaire entrepreneur who formed the Reform Party and took on both George H.W. Bush, the Republican incumbent, and Democrat Bill Clinton.

Perot ran the most successful third party presidential campaign in the United States since 1912 and for the better part of three months, he was ahead of both Bush and Clinton.

He won an astounding 18.9 per cent of the popular vote, though he carried no states and therefore won no electoral college votes. Still, in 31 states he garnered more than 20 per cent and in nine, over a quarter of the total.

His voters shared the fiscal conservatism of the Republicans and the social moderation of the Democrats but were angry with both parties when it came to their domination by special interests and their lack of interest in serious political and governmental reform.

Like Perot, Trump has an appeal across demographics and party lines and is benefitting from today’s negative attitudes toward Washington and career politicians.

Both Trump and Perot are part of a long-established American tradition: the well-meaning amateur, sometimes even naive outsider, challenging the system and battling the entrenched forces of corruption.

Populists rather than either conservatives or liberals, both could claim that only a successful businessman can fix the corrupt political system. “I was not put on the ballot by any PAC money, by any foreign lobbyist money, by any special interest money,” Perot said in an October 1992 presidential debate. 

He singled out “our own political elites who enter government to gain expertise and personal contacts while on the public payroll, then leave to enrich themselves by taking inside knowledge to the other side.”

Perot evinced a mistrust of the establishment media, convinced that no matter what he did or said, they would make every effort to discredit him and portray him as unpredictable, dangerous, an egomaniac and loose cannon.

Perot wanted an end to foreign entanglements to solve other countries’ problems, as does Trump, who in a speech on April 27 asked why “our politicians seem more interested in defending the borders of foreign countries than in defending their own.”

Perot’s economic nationalism provided him with a ready-made political base. Like Trump, he channeled economic resentment through opposition to free trade; some may recall his famous line about the “giant sucking sound” of American jobs going south to Mexico if NAFTA were enacted.

Trump too is an avowed opponent of recent trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and contends that America’s disastrous trade policies is destroying the middle class.

He noted an estimate made by the Economic Policy Institute -- a liberal think-tank affiliated with the labour movement, by the way -- that the country has lost three million jobs to China since 2001.

In 1960, about one in four American workers had a job in manufacturing. Today fewer than one in 10 are employed in the sector. Since 2000 alone, the U.S. has shed five million manufacturing jobs.

“America’s politicians -- beholden to global corporate interests who profit from offshoring -- have enabled jobs theft in every imaginable way,” Trump charged. “They have tolerated foreign trade cheating while enacting trade deals that encourage companies to shift production overseas.”

How will Hillary Clinton answer these charges?