Everything about Ross Perot totally explained
Henry Ross Perot (born
June 27 1930) is an
American businessman from
Texas, who is best known for seeking the office of
President of the United States in
1992 and
1996. Perot founded
Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 1962; sold the company to
General Motors in 1984, and founded
Perot Systems in 1988.
With an estimated net worth of around $4.4 billion in 2007, he's ranked by
Forbes as the
76th-richest person in America.
Early life
Perot was born in
Texarkana, Texas, to Luly Maye Perot (nee Ray) and Gabriel Ross Perot. His father was a
cotton picker. Perot made
Eagle Scout in 1943 and is a recipient of the
Distinguished Eagle Scout Award. The local
Boy Scouts of America council office in his hometown of Texarkana is named in his honor. His son and two of his grandsons are Eagle Scouts. The document was sold at auction for $US21.3 million on December 18, 2007.
Ross Perot put up the majority of the venture capital for
Steve Jobs's
NeXT computer project in 1986. Also in 1986, after heavy criticism of General Motors, which had purchased EDS, he was bought out for $700 million. In 1988, he founded
Perot Systems Corporation, Inc. in
Plano, Texas. His son,
H. Ross Perot, Jr., eventually succeeded him as CEO. Today, H. Ross Sr. serves as Chairman Emeritus, and Ross Jr. serves as Chairman.
Early political activities
In the same year that Perot organized the rescue mission in Iran,
Texas governor Bill Clements requested his assistance developing policy to reduce illegal drug use in the state. Perot led the Texas War on Drugs Committee that proposed five laws, all of which were passed by the legislature.
In 1982, he was called upon again by Clements to help improve the quality of the states' public education, and ended up leading the effort ("Select Committee on Education") to reform the school system, which resulted in major legislative changes. The best known of Perot's proposals which were passed into law was the "No Pass, No Play" rule, under which it was required that students have passing grades in order to participate in any school-sponsored extra-curricular activities. The intent was to prevent high school sports from being the focus of the school's funding, and to emphasize the importance of education for the students who participated in sports. Another key reform measure was a call for teacher competency testing, which was strongly opposed by the teachers unions in Texas.
Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing in the early 1990s Ross Perot began speaking out about what he described as the failings of the United States
government. Perot asserted that the United States "had grown arrogant and complacent after the War (
World War II)" and was no longer the world's greatest nation. Instead of looking into what was to come, he argued, America was "daydreaming of our past while the rest of the world was building its future." He said:
Go to Rome, go to Paris, go to London. Those cities are centuries old. They're thriving. They're clean. They work. Our oldest cities are brand new compared to them and yet… go to New York, drive through downtown Washington, go to Detroit, go to Philadelphia. What's wrong with us?
In
Florida in 1990, retired financial planner
Jack Gargan funded a series of "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" (a reference to a famous quotation from the 1976 political and mass media satire movie,
Network) newspaper advertisements denouncing the
U.S. Congress for voting for legislative pay raises at a time when average wages nationwide were not increasing. Gargan later founded "Throw the Rascals Out", which Ross Perot supported.
Perot didn't support
President George H. W. Bush and vigorously opposed the United States involvement in the 1990-1991
Persian Gulf War. He urged Senators to vote against the war resolution and began considering a Presidential run.
1992 presidential candidacy
On
February 20,
1992, he appeared on
CNN's
Larry King Live and announced his intention to run if his supporters could get his name on the ballot in all 50 states. With such declared policies as balancing the
federal budget, firm
pro-choice stance, expansion of the
war on drugs, ending
outsourcing of jobs, opposition to
gun control, belief in
protectionism on trade, his support of the
Environmental Protection Agency and enacting
electronic direct democracy via "electronic
town halls," he became a potential candidate and soon polled roughly even with the two major party candidates.
Perot's candidacy received increasing media attention when the competitive phase of the primary season ended for the two major parties. President
George H.W. Bush was losing support, and Democratic nominee
Bill Clinton was still suffering from the numerous scandal allegations made in the previous months. With the insurgent candidacies of Republican
Pat Buchanan and Democrat
Jerry Brown winding down, Perot was the natural beneficiary of populist resentment toward establishment politicians. On May 25, 1992 he was featured on the cover of
Time Magazine with the title "Waiting for Perot", an allusion to
Samuel Beckett's play
Waiting for Godot.
With several months to go until the Democratic and Republican conventions, Perot filled the vacuum of election news, as his supporters began petition drives to get him on the ballot in all 50 states. This sense of momentum was reinforced when Perot hired two savvy campaign managers in Democrat
Hamilton Jordan and Republican
Ed Rollins.
Accompanying the surge in support for Perot was increased scrutiny of his background. Reports surfaced of Perot hiring private investigators to obtain personal information about business and political adversaries. His temperament was brought into question by some who claimed that he exhibited irritability and an authoritarian management style. Around the same time, Perot was criticized for a remark made during a speech at the
NAACP convention. Perot was sympathizing with the plight of African Americans during tough economic times, but referred to his audience as "you people", a phrase that was loudly objected to by some members of the audience, and deemed insensitive by the media. Perot also found himself challenged on gay issues, as he initially opposed lifting the ban on gays in the military and allowing gays to serve in a Perot Administration. After much pressure from gay groups, Perot switched stances on gay issues, stating that he'd be open to appointing gays to his cabinet and would unequivocally favor lifting the ban on homosexual service in the military.
These developments had an adverse impact on Perot's campaign and his approval rating in opinion polls was no longer rising. On
July 16 1992, Perot reconsidered running for the presidency, even if he wasn't placed on all 50 state ballots. At that time he was only on 24 state ballots. He was encouraged by the selection of the
Democratic party ticket of
Bill Clinton and
Al Gore at the
Democratic National Convention.
Nevertheless, in September he qualified for all 50 state ballots. On
October 1, he announced his intention to start running again. He explained his earlier withdrawal by claiming that
Republican operatives had wanted to reveal compromising photos of his daughter, which would disrupt her wedding, and he wanted to spare her from embarrassment. Scott Barnes, a private investigator and security consultant who had testified to that effect and supported Perot's story would later, in 1997, reveal that he'd tricked Perot into believing that it was true, but it was a hoax he created with others outside any political campaign. Barnes was a Perot supporter, and believed if it were revealed Republicans were involved in dirty tricks, it would harm Bush's candidacy.
He campaigned in 16 states and spent an estimated $65.4 million of his own money. Perot employed the innovative strategy of purchasing half-hour blocks of time on major networks for
infomercial-type campaign ads; these ads garnered more viewership than many sitcoms, with one Friday night program in October attracting 10.5 million viewers.
Perot's running mate was retired
Vice Admiral James Stockdale, a well-respected former Vietnam
prisoner of war (POW). Perot was a long-time supporter of POWs. In December 1969 he organized and flew to North Vietnam in an attempt to deliver 30-tons of supplies to beleaguered American POWs in North Vietnam. Although North Vietnam blocked the flights, the effort was instrumental in bringing the plight of those POWs to the world's attention and their captors soon began treating them better. Exit polls also showed that Ross Perot drew 38% of his vote from Bush, and 38% of his vote from Clinton, while the rest of his voters would have stayed home in his absence on the ballot.
Based on his performance in the popular vote in 1992, Perot was entitled to receive federal election funding for 1996. Perot remained in the public eye after the election and championed opposition to the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), urging voters to listen for the "
giant sucking sound" of American jobs heading south to
Mexico should NAFTA be ratified.
Reform Party and 1996 presidential run
Perot tried to keep his movement alive through the mid-1990s, continuing to speak about the increasing national debt. He was a prominent campaigner against NAFTA, and even debated
Al Gore on the issue on
Larry King Live: what was then the largest audience ever to watch a cable program tuned in to the debate. Perot's behavior during the debate was a source of mirth thereafter, including his repeated pleas to "let me finish" in his southern drawl. The debate was seen by many as effectively ending Perot’s political career . Support for NAFTA went from 34% to 57%. The following week, NAFTA passed the House, with some hesitant members of Congress saying the Perot debate helped make a vote for the bill more popular. Perot sponsored conferences which were attended by numerous high-profile politicians.
In 1995, he founded the
Reform Party and won their nomination for the
1996 election. His running mate was
Pat Choate. Because of the ballot access laws he'd to run as an Independent on many state ballots. Perot received just eight percent of the popular vote in 1996, much less than in the 1992 race but still an unusually successful third-party showing by U.S. standards. He spent much less of his own money in this race than he'd four years before, and also allowed other people to contribute to his campaign, unlike his prior race. One common explanation for the decline was Perot's exclusion from the
presidential debates, based on the preferences of the Democratic and Republican party candidates (as described by George Farah in
Open Debates). In 1996 his opponents were U.S. Senator
Bob Dole (Republican) and President
Bill Clinton (Democrat).
Later activities
Later in the 1990s, Perot's detractors accused him of not allowing the Reform Party to develop into a genuine national political party, but rather keeping it a movement to support him, as people close to Perot's electoral campaign had still been in party offices because the majority of Reform Party members had continued to elect them in party offices. Perot didn't give an endorsement during
Jesse Ventura's run for
governor of Minnesota in the 1998 election, and this became suspicious to detractors when he made fun of Ventura at a conference after Ventura had a fall-out with the press. The party leadership grew in tighter opposition to groups supporting Ventura and Jack Gargan. Reasons for this were demonstrated when Jack Gargan was officially removed as Reform Party Chairman by the Reform Party National Committee.
In the
2000 presidential election, Perot refused to become openly involved in the dispute inside the Reform Party between supporters of
Pat Buchanan and of
John Hagelin. Perot was reportedly unhappy with how the party was disintegrating, and how he was being portrayed in the press, and chose to remain quiet on the election at that time. He appeared on Larry King Live four days before the election, and endorsed George W. Bush for President. Despite his earlier opposition to NAFTA, Perot remained largely silent about expanded use of guest worker visas in the United States, with Buchanan supporters attributing this silence to
his corporate reliance on foreign workers
. Eventually, Perot ended all ties between himself and the Reform Party, which was largely defunct in most states and has filed a
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) lawsuit against another branch of the Reform Party. (Some state parties have affiliated with the new (Buchananite)
America First Party; others gave
Ralph Nader their ballot lines in the
2004 presidential election.)
Since then, Perot has been largely silent on political issues, refusing to answer most questions about politics from the press. Whenever a paper has secured an interview with him he usually remains on the subject of his business career and refuses to answer the more specific questions on politics, candidates, or his past activities.
The one break from this has been in 2005 when he was asked to testify before the
Texas Legislature about proposals to extend technology to students, through making laptops available; and changing the process of buying books, through making electronic books available and allowing schools to buy books at the local level instead of going through the state. Perot promoted the legislation. In an April 2005
interview, Perot expresses concern about the state of progress on issues he'd raised in his presidential runs.
In January 2008, Perot publicly came out against Republican candidate
John McCain and endorsed
Mitt Romney for President. He also announced that he'll soon be launching a new website with updated economic graphs and charts.
Electoral history
United States presidential election, 1992
United States presidential election, 1996
Bill Clinton/Al Gore (D) (Inc.) - 47,400,125 (49.2%) and 379 electoral votes (31 states and D.C. carried)
Bob Dole/Jack Kemp (R) - 39,198,755 (40.7%) and 159 electoral votes (19 states carried)
Ross Perot/Pat Choate (Ref.) - 8,085,402 (8.8%) and 0 electoral votesFurther Information
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