Word: perots
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Unlike Bush, Clinton or anyone else who has seriously run for the White House since Dwight Eisenhower, Perot is defined almost entirely by his person rather than by specific issue positions. Asked his views in an April TV interview on the upcoming environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro, Perot gave an answer, both refreshingly candid and alarmingly ill-informed: "I don't know a thing in the world about it." In an appearance on Meet the Press, Perot appeared befuddled as he tried to defend his misguided assertion that $180 billion could be saved by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Perot knows his reputation for being hypersensitive to criticism -- and last week went out of his way to gush over how much he enjoyed Dana Carvey's impersonation of him on Saturday Night Live. But he also took pains to stop visitors to his 17th-floor office suite before a portrait of himself, commissioned and autographed by former Vietnam prisoners of war, so he could * say, "I don't think the POWS would have given me this if they thought what I had been doing for them was a publicity stunt." Like a salesman whose primary product...