Ross Perot photo by Allan Warren, Creative Commons
I just heard that Ross Perot passed this morning, and wish to repost a story I wrote a while back on him as a political candidate. I voted for Mr. Perot in 1992 and he’s the last presidential candidate that I believed in. Since then I’ve mostly been voting against one candidate or another, or for “the lesser of two evils.”
We have a “reality show” government these days with a buffoon in charge, a cast of argumentative idiots, the studio audience throwing sodas and punching one another, while the media, other governments, sore losers and vindictive winners throw firecrackers and feces to keep things hopping.
Sucked into the reality show world, one may lose track of how a government should operate. Our educational system, infrastructure, standard of living, and public trust decline, while the gap between rich and poor grows and our attention is riveted on the latest rancorous social issues — religious liberty vs. LGBT rights; free speech vs. hate speech; innocent until proven guilty vs. #metoo; facts vs. fake news; the Second Amendment vs. gun control; Republicans vs. Democrats. And so it goes in a race to the lowest common denominator, the most degraded assertions and conflicts, the stupidity that like an auto wreck, grabs attention and bottlenecks traffic but accomplishes nothing.
Politics has always been ripe for conflict, lies and mudslinging. The Founding Fathers recognized that and put multiple levels of checks and balances into the Constitution and wrote the Bill of Rights in a fairly successful attempt to tamp down the nastiness and irrationality that is resident in nearly everyone while catalyzing the charity and good sense that is also resident in nearly everyone.
America missed the boat in 1992 when it largely ignored Ross Perot. And before you harken back to the critics of the day who ridiculed his big ears, squeaky voice, etc., take a look at this half-hour video about the problems facing America in 1992 and Perot’s predictions on what might happen if they were not corrected.
Rather than just blame others for the problems and promising to “make everything wonderful,” he had specific measures designed to fix failing infrastructure, help improve schools, revive the economy, balance the budget and improve the quality of health care. He used charts and sounded like a schoolmaster lecturing a class of nincompoops, and was therefore a ripe target for comics, opposition politicians and vested interests. But watch the video and you will see solutions that cut both ways, that would have balanced the budget by 1998, cut the interest payments on the national debt and pumped trillions of dollars into improving the country. But he appealed for sacrifice, said it wouldn’t be easy, and we chose pork and BS instead.
Clinton, Bush and Obama were not bad presidents, but they continued to paper over the cracks, blame the opposition, ignore the debt and promise us everything if we would just vote for them. And we went for it. The looming problems Perot outlined (growing national debt, huge amounts of interest on that debt, the widening gap between rich and poor, declining educational system, declining standard of living, lousy health-care system, political polarization, deteriorating infrastructure and more) continued to grow like toadstools in the dark.
Perot laid bare the country’s political and economic dark side, but instead of a sober hearing by the media, he was widely ridiculed by detractors, excoriated as an outsider, an interloper, and barred from disrupting the smoothly choreographed political rain dance.
Conservatives are often derided as “wanting to return to the past.” But that derision ignores the fact that lessons can be learned and adjustments made based on a careful analysis of those lessons so we can move forward with creative ideas toward a postulated better world.
But can we even get there from here? Not without a look at the basic decisions and policies and vested interests that got us into this insane reality show in the first place. The Founding Fathers gave us a workable national structure, but to make it function requires grownups.
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