H. Ross Perot: Businessman And Presidential Wannabe

Harry Truman was a dry-goods store owner and Jimmy Carter had the family peanut farm, but neither of them ran for office based on their business skills. Of the others, there was one actor and quite a few professional politicians. (I’m limiting my search group to presidents in my lifetime.) Three candidates stressed their business experience and promised to bring those skills to running the government. That would be George W. Bush, Donald J. Trump and H. Ross Perot.

(I’m leaving out Willard Romney. Most of his resume was business related, but it was not the kind of experience that anyone would want voters to even know about, much less consider, being all robber-baron stuff.)

The funny part is that the two men in that small group who actually won the presidency were awful businessmen. W. Bush’s resume included several business failures that lost a lot of money for other people but from which he was curiously bailed out, plus a few downright shady deals (The Texas Rangers episode), and even included allegations of insider trading. Not a lot of textbook success there. D. J. Trump talks a good game, but his own record is full of bankruptcies, defaults and the stiffing of partners and vendors. The Donald received a few curious bailouts himself (like his dad buying millions of dollars’ worth of chips to help him meet payroll in Atlantic City). Neither of those fellows seems to have been very successful at running businesses at all.

The one who was demonstrably a wild business success was H. Ross Perot, and he is the only one of the three to fail in his bid for the presidency.

Being a third-party candidate hurt his chances, but he made a historically great show from that status. He got 19% of the popular vote in 1992 (19,741,065 votes). (Zero electoral votes, although he did win majorities in many individual counties.)*

Perot, unlike those other two clowns, was a business wiz. Everything he touched turned to gold. He was a graduate of Annapolis, the U. S. Naval Academy. As a salesman for IBM he made his quota for the year within a month or so and decided that he could do all that and more if he were on his own. This was the early 1960s. Perot started Electric Data Systems and it was a winner. In 1984 he sold that company to General Motors for two point four billion dollars ($2,400,000,000.) In 1988 he started Perot Systems Corporation. That company was sold to Dell Computers in 2009 for three point nine billion dollars ($3,900,000,000).

It’s safe to say that Henry Ross Perot was the best businessman ever to run for the presidency.

They say, though, that running the country is not like running a business, and it’s true. It’s totally different, is what it is. If you are running a country, you cannot default on loans just to achieve some strategic advantage. You cannot declare bankruptcy just to put pressure on creditors. And then there are the things that you can do, such as printing money and borrowing at low interest. It’s totally different.

W. Bush, and now Trump, only proved that business experience not only does not help, but also is very likely to make matters worse.

What would Mr. Perot have done in office? 

His platform included:

1.   Balance the Federal budget;

2.   He opposed NAFTA (he came up with the quote, “that giant sucking sound that you hear is jobs moving to Mexico;”

3.   He opposed gun control;

4.   End job outsourcing (i.e., shipping jobs overseas); and

5.   Reduce the deficit by imposing a gasoline tax and cutting Social Security.

That looks an awful lot like Donald Trump’s professed goals. It’s a program without a chance of working. In fact, it’s a program that will do more harm than good. So I guess that even H. Ross Perot, the genuine business success, would also have failed to run the government better than mere politicians.

Incidentally, H. Ross Perot is alive as of this writing. In 2015, he was listed as the 129^th richest man in America, with $4 billion dollars. He was an odd bird, but likeable, in his way. I wish him well.

*Which major party candidate was assisted by the votes that went to Perot? That’s about as clear as mud. Perot’s votes seem to have come from all points of the political compass, so you can’t say that he took conservative votes away from George H. W. Bush. Perot’s votes came mostly from the middle-class, so the votes of the rich and the poor went to their respective natural beneficiaries. I’m no expert, and I haven’t made an exhaustive study of it, but it appears likely that Clinton won in spite of Perot, and not because of him. 

Here Be Monsters

Democratic institutions have been a theme of mine. I recently wrote about the danger of weakening them or losing them, with the resulting loss of democracy itself. Watching Herr Professor Doktor and President Elect Donald Trump pick his cabinet this week was an object lesson in what I was talking about.

Not only his cabinet, but also the heads of some agencies. Those Federal Agencies are also democratic institutions. They are very powerful. They have the power of regulation over various aspects of commerce and national security. The rules that they promulgate have the power of law. They are at the center of any effort to move American democracy forward.

Does anyone think that this recent crop of appointees will do that? Does anyone believe that they will make decisions based upon the best interest of the American people? I certainly don't. I fact, I see them as having been hand-picked to destroy the very agencies that they have been appointed to head. Ben Carson at HUD? Ms. DeVos at Education? The Cabinet is just as bad. The CEO of Exxon, a Putin crony, as Secretary of State? Come on.

And down the list. I don't feel like making that list right now; my blood pressure is quite high enough already.

If Der Trump makes it through the next few months and actually completes a term in office, our democracy will have taken a huge hit. Don't forget that the Republicans are in charge of all of those states as well. Voter suppression and extreme Gerrymandering will continue; the Supreme Court will have been packed and it will back up the Republican agenda; regulations that insure fair business practices, worker safety, clean air and water, safe banking practices, etc, will have been gutted. There will have been more freedoms taken away, and more people senselessly incarcerated, and probably more wars senselessly started.  I could go on with this list as well, but you get the picture.

It's enough to make one nostalgic for the "election" of W. Bush. His installation also required behind the scenes shenanigans. He was an unmitigated disaster, too, but perhaps soon we will remember him fondly. I was predictably verklempt when he took office, and I made my feelings known. The typical response from family and friends was, don't worry, how bad can it be? Well, it was very, very bad. He took the Supreme Court to an existential tipping point, and he ruined the government's finances by cutting taxes on the top earners, and squandering trillions on endless, pointless wars and new weapons. He deregulated banks at just the wrong moment in history, leading to a world wide collapse in financial markets that is still reverberating. ("just the wrong moment . . ." because computers had become routine agents of stock trading, increasing the number of transactions exponentially and allowing the creation of new instruments to create essentially valueless new money.)  He cost us, the world, umpteen trillions of dollars, and all we got, as the saying goes, "was this lousy t-shirt!" (Well, that and a zoom-climb in budget deficits that added a trillion dollars or so to the national debt every year.) But W., for all of his mischief, did seem to observe cultural norms in most observable ways, he had limits. He did seem like he was "of this earth."

What we are looking at now is a strange breed of monsters. Not since the "Ohio Gang" has there been anything approaching them for breathtaking corruption and self-interest. And leading them is a creature that does not seem to possess any human characteristics at all. Our new president has no respect whatsoever for the ordinary processes of government, you know, the balance of power, compromise solutions, etc. In fact, he's already actively at war with the intelligence community, peremptorily attacking the courts and the congress, and interfering with long established foreign policy.  What will become of us? Porca miseria! Our new leader is Porco Dio!

I should stop now, before I actually have a heart attack.

Barack Obama And El Greco

A dubious poll appeared last week that claimed to show that President Obama was the "worst" president since World War II.  I made a crack on Facebook about George Bush II, who is, let's face it, the obvious winner of that contest, hands down, stop your calls, we have a winner!  It was a straightforward comment, meaning simply that Bush was a worse president than Mr. Obama.  Facebook lit up.

So many people these days are unreasonably negative about Mr. Obama, for one thing.  Not to mention that anyone who declines to say terrible things about Obama is immediately attacked for "supporting" him, which is given to mean that one approves of everything that he's done and believes that he is doing a fabulous job. This is either a reading comprehension problem or a pathology of the mind.

There is little hope of redressing this imbalance this year or next, but I'm hoping that history will treat President Obama like it has treated many others who were underappreciated in their own times.

For example, the great painter, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, aka, El Greco ("The Greek"), who spent hundreds of years on the shit list.  "Contemptible and ridiculous, as much for the disjointed drawing as for the insipid colors . . ."

The people who wrote these things were just not understanding what they were looking at.  They were looking at the paintings after they had been moved from churches to museums.  El Greco's paintings, the famous ones, were originally hung high on the walls of Spanish churches.  So you'd be looking up at them.  Any decent artist will adjust his perspective to accommodate that situation.  And the churches were bright spaces with vast white walls, which necessarily affected color choices.  Today we understand what El Greco was doing, and we appreciate it as great art.

I don't know if President Obama will ever be considered to have been a great president, but I do know this much:  he will be remembered more fondly than Bush.