Word: perots
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...ROSS PEROT PITCHES HIMSELF AS A MAN OF THE PEOPLE, WITH the people helping him, in true grass-roots fashion, to get on the ballot. But as Perot gathers strength, the little people are finding themselves pushed out by local bigwigs. In Virginia a Perot backer says he was ousted, partly over his desire to include more blacks in the campaign. One Oklahoma activist, wary of losing control to local heavies, says he's keeping 35,000 petition signatures in a bank vault until he delivers them to state election officials. The Perot campaign insists that it is not trampling...
Imagine it is 1994. The economy is still stagnating, Japan remains in the doldrums as well, interest rates are rising, and the deficit has reached $600 billion. Something has to be done -- and quickly. President Ross Perot, making good on a campaign promise, gets on the horn to the TV networks and organizes one of his famous electronic town meetings. That night, before a television audience Murphy Brown would die for, he lays out the nation's precarious economic situation and the stark choices the U.S. confronts. Even before his presentation is over, the returns begin to pour...
That's how teledemocracy is supposed to work, according to Perot, the billionaire computer executive and putative presidential candidate. The concept has a certain gut-level appeal. To voters fed up with the paralysis of Congress and the special-interest outrages that characterize politics-as- usual, the idea that the citizenry might bypass all the musty machinery of representative democracy and directly influence the government seems enormously attractive...
...speeches and interviews, Perot implies that the technology required to create an electronic town meeting is already in place -- an impression reinforced by events like his much ballyhooed satellite broadcast last Friday that linked Perot rallies in six different states. Participants in five U.S. cities could hear one another cheer the candidate as he spoke to them from Orlando. To have a truly interactive town meeting, however, a number of technical barriers must still be hurdled. And even if that happens, it is not at all clear that the result will be any way to run a country...
When he describes his plan for taking the pulse of the people, Perot seems to assume that viewers will have access to some sort of interactive television network. Such a system would allow couch spuds to register their opinions simply by pressing a button on a keyboard or remote control. Unfortunately, interactive television does not yet exist -- except in a handful of small pilot projects -- and it has not been determined who will provide the service when it does arrive...