Word: perot
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NAFTA is another reason. The "giant sucking sound" Ross Perot warned about has worked in reverse: since NAFTA took effect in 1994, it has drawn Mexico ever more tightly to the U.S. and Canada. That's been especially true under Calderón's more conservative National Action Party (PAN), which has ruled Mexico since 2000 and whose voter base resides in the country's more U.S.-friendly north. And then, perhaps most important, Mexico for the past decade has been waging an increasingly horrific war against its drug cartels, whose narcoinsurgency has afforded the government little time and energy...
Third, more Ross Perots. Vicious-circle politics thrives because while gridlock sours the public on both parties, the out-of-government party (particularly if it's also the antigovernment party) benefits anyway. That might change were our political system filled with latter-day Perots, cranky independent candidates determined to punish both parties for not getting anything done. In the early 1990s, the original Perot combined an assault on the way government did business with a demand that it climb out of debt. Like the public itself, Perot believed there was a commonsense, nonideological way to cut the deficit, if only...
Above all, new Perots would remind Washington that although Americans disagree on lots of things, the country isn't as divided as its capital. Every four or eight years, a new President gets elected by pledging to bring the country together. And every time he fails, the pressure on our two-party system builds. When government acts to solve problems, even if the solutions aren't perfect, it breaks the vicious circle of political failure and mistrust. When it comes to health care, for example, virtually every expansion of government's role - Medicare, Medicaid, the veterans' health care system...
...coaster ride is nothing compared with the 50-point plunge in George H.W. Bush's ratings as he approached his re-election campaign. Then, as now, the culprit was a sour economy, but the voice of indignation came not from TV ranters but from a Dallas billionaire. H. Ross Perot catalyzed an anti-incumbent, back-to-basics, pox-on-Washington movement that is the spiritual ancestor of today's Tea Parties - right down to the hand-painted placards and the occasional powdered wig. Suzanne Curran, a Tea Partyer from Virginia, sounded as if she had stepped out of a time...
...striking that the Reform Party, founded by Perot to keep his crusade alive, has virtually no appeal to the Tea Party crowd. There is a lesson in that. Grass-roots uprisings come and go, and protest candidates rise and fall. In the flush of righteous battle, people focus on the beliefs they share and tolerate points of difference. Eventually, though, the battle ends, the smoke clears, and even when the movement has some success, its troops tend to go their separate ways. After Perot retired from politics, his movement fell to pieces; Patrick Buchanan carried the Reform Party's banner...