Word: perots
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When his allegations caused a sensation, Perot backed off, castigating reporters for what he called "your twisted, distorted stories." Yet it was Perot himself who made the disclosures and who talked up the CBS program at campaign stump speeches in New Jersey and Pennsylvania...
Striking back in an attempt to crumble Perot's support, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater told reporters Perot was "a paranoid person who has delusions." That pop-psych diagnosis was motivated by politics, of course, but it also squared with Perot's long history of obsession with plots. In one of his half-hour commercials, the Texan revived a claim that he had been the target of five armed terrorists hired by North Vietnamese to assassinate him 20 years ago. A single guard dog ostensibly scared the gunmen off his property. Perot never reported the incident to authorities, though...
Then there was the alleged plot against his life by drug lords. In a separate controversy, his long feud with Washington over its handling of the MIA issue, Perot accused Richard Armitage, Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, of a nefarious cover-up. In running his successful computer empire, Perot occasionally subjected employees to polygraph tests. Last week seven defectors from his volunteer network charged that they had been targets of improper credit investigations. This pattern is familiar to those who worked with Perot long before he grew politically ambitious. "He keeps so much in his head," says...
...Perot rose in the polls last spring, the press stopped treating him as a novelty and began to examine his record. Perot's pat response, instead of addressing the critical stories or shrugging them off, was to blame "the Republican Party dirty-tricks committee." But Perot's real problem is with the way America goes about electing its President, a rigorous (and yes, sometimes punishing) process that tests the candidates' ideas and mettle. Any candidate for high office, particularly one who is new to politics, must expect his record and statements to be scrutinized. Perot decided to circumvent part...
Nonetheless, Perot retained a substantial following even while his image as a can-do truth teller came into question. One reason is a broad loss of confidence in both major parties. That credibility gap has been growing for years, and the punching match this season between Bush and Bill Clinton has widened it. State Department officials did, after all, troll through passport files on Clinton -- and his mother -- looking for information to use against the Democrat. That the Republicans undertook so mindless an excursion gave a trace of credibility to Perot's latest charges...