Ross Perot withraws - 24 July 1992

One very angry man last week brought a breach of promise suit in Dallas. It might well be unique in the history of disappointed lovers. The object of his jilted affection was Mr Ross Perot. The suit charged that Mr Perot had broken the promise he gave to millions of Americans to run for president, cut through the trash of the system, topple the establishment and lead the people to a simpler, finer and fairer America.

Nothing much is likely to come out of this man's suit. For all I know it may by now have been withdrawn, but it expressed in an intense, sincere, slightly dotty form, the allegiance just falling short of adoration that Mr Perot has roused in millions of Americans since that artless evening in February when he was just a tycoon being interviewed on an evening show and when, to the abrupt, almost ad lib question, "Would you consider running for president?", he said, if they'd get his name on the ballot in all 50 states, yes he would.

When he quit, he was on 25 state ballots and rising. His announcement on the Thursday evening didn't quite swamp the following for Governor Clinton's acceptance speech but it took over the headlines next morning, and before that a strange thing happened. At the end of Clinton's speech and while the delegates were waving flags and embracing and wiping eyes, a camera swooped in from nowhere and zoomed in on a man holding up the New York Times of the next, Friday, opening and there, a three-column headline, was the staggering declaration, Perot chooses running mate, Oprah Winfrey.

The camera danced over this feature for a moment or two and cut to a bewildered bystander saying, well what do you know, there it is, and then we were back to the crooning, cheering and apparently unaware crowds. Oprah Winfrey is a large, popular, black, daytime talk show hostess and about as likely to be picked for Vice-President as, say, Madonna. This astonishing news was flashed around the country, several of my friends in California had the word within minutes of that camera shot and as the night wore on, the thousands of delegates and stragglers at Madison Square Garden seemed strangely unmoved by this staggering development.

Next morning it came out. The headline, the issue of the New York Times was a fake, but beautifully done, absolutely authentic as to layout, typeface etc. Of course by the Friday morning, not even the New York Times had space or time to comment on this lark, it was too busy thundering, Perot quits race, leaving two-man field. And below that stunner was the more dense line, Clinton vows change and new covenant. By the way, I'd better say it now before either the opposition or Mr Clinton's own team comes to the conclusion. The governor is going to have trouble with that covenant promise. What does he mean? Nobody's quite sure. It's an attempt, of course, to early on, to coin a memorable slogan that identifies his campaign and he hopes, his presidency. Teddy Roosevelt had his Square Deal, Franklin Roosevelt had his New Deal, which stuck and resonated down the 12 years of his reign. John Kennedy proclaimed the New Frontier, which was catch enough to see him into the White House, though after that nobody knew for sure what or where it was. But Mr Clinton promises a New Covenant. It won't do.

Anyway, since that final night of the Democrats' orgy, more words have been used, more arguments tossed back and forth about Ross Perot, than we've read or heard about anyone since the fall of Gorbachev and the rise of Yeltsin. Naturally the weekly news magazines would be failing in their function, which is to explain everything, if they didn't boldly entitle their pieces, Why Perot Quit. I'd better say right away, I doubt than anyone including Mr Perot, can give you one certain reason why he did it. He and all the commentators have given many reasons but in matters of bold or drastic behaviour, I remember Dr Freud saying, there is always one reason. After that the intellect invents cover-up reasons.

Well, there was one incident about five days before he gave up that raised eyebrows everywhere and I'm sure must have given Mr Perot a nasty jolt. On Saturday 11 July, Mr Perot was addressing the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples. It's the oldest of all national black organisations, you can almost guess as much from it retaining the word, coloured. No outfit today would so christen itself, it would have to be African-American. However, the association has a very long and honourable history.

It was started so long ago as 1910 and you can get some idea of how socially, historically far away that is, when I tell you that its first aims were to end the lynching of blacks and to try and improve the lot of sharecroppers and tenant farmers. It's been through all the subsequent battles and in the past 30, 40 years, heard itself mocked by new black associations, more radical black leaders. Nevertheless it is a national association with several hundred thousand members and a speech before it is an obligation of anyone running for the presidency. President Bush and Mr Clinton both were prompt to appear and make their usual special pledges to blacks and other minorities and then it was Mr Perot's turn.

At the end of his speech, crisp, racy, direct as ever, he assured his audience that he would be mindful of your people. It was a tiny, fatal phrase. A reporter wrote: it marked him as a son of Depression era Texas when white folks could afford to be a little patronising. Mr Perot's large audience was respectful but a nerve had been touched. Of course there was nothing deliberate about it, it was a slip, truly a Freudian slip. It came from deep down and long ago, when any black who'd just been told his people would be taken care of, would have answered, whatever he said under his breath, yes sir, thank you, sir.

It's most striking, strikes me about once ever four years, that politicians can recite the wildest charges, commit shuddering errors of taste and fact, attack each other with malice and exaggeration and soon it's all forgotten, but make one little slip, which appears to set you off from the people you're addressing and you're a goner. Lots of us whites of Mr Perot's generation and beyond his, mine, are quite capable of saying, the black people but no longer in public saying, your people. Mr Perot was genuinely shocked by the response to his slip. He said it made him sound like David Duke, that forgotten right-wing segregationist from Louisiana. To an aide of his he said, this is the last straw. That, on his part, is surely a huge overreaction but it did show that the campaign had put a strain on him beyond anything he'd imagined. That seems to be it.

From the reflections after the events, of the two professionals he'd hired, the man who ran Ronald Reagan's successful campaign and the man who had been Jimmy Carter's principal adviser in his successful run, Mr Perot, it comes out, had never expected his own life, his experience as a business man, corporation executive, to be gone into, questioned. He never expected the media to do what they do with everybody these days, go looking for cracks in the public visage, smells in the back rooms. Boasting of not being a professional, he never expected to be subjected to the extreme scrutiny professionals must suffer.

Finally, he tried to respond to the constant charge that he never got down to particulars, specifics, as we say. He would drastically trim the deficit by $400 billion, therefore balance the budge in five years. He spent two days or more, maybe he'd spent weeks, working over the actual parts of the body politic that were going to be cut and he found, to his dismay, it wouldn't begin to work. Then by some swift mental association, he decided he could not possibly win the election outright.

His standing in the polls at that point was still about on the low one-third of the vote and that would mean, and it probably would have meant, that none of the three candidates would get a an election majority and so, as the Constitution dictates, it would have gone into the House of Representatives, the new one, in January. Since the House is and again will be, overwhelmingly Democrat, therefore he figured, the Democrats would win. Time, Mr Perot decided, to quit. In the last moment, he tossed a bride's bouquet to Mr Clinton. Since, Mr Perot said, the Democratic Party had been re-vitalised, much of his urge for change had passed over to them. God bless Ross Perot, said a Clinton aide.

Talking of simple phrases that damn a Presidential candidate, I think the best was spoken in the election of 1884. The Republican candidate was one Mr Blaine, known to his opponents as the continental liar from the state of Maine. The Democrat was Governor Cleveland of New York. During the campaign, it came out, it was brought out by the Republicans, that Governor Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate son by a woman he'd abandoned. Quite right, said Cleveland, but she abandoned the child and I maintain him in an orphanage and take care of him to this day. Shock and grief among the Democrats.

At the end of the campaign, Mr Blaine returned to new York, to a reception given for him and heard a parson say, we, the Republicans, have no intention of turning the country over to the party of rum, Romanism and rebellion. A slap at the Irish. A Democrat spy, so to speak, present, went off in ecstasy, had the phrase printed and dropped in a blizzard of handbills over New York City. The election was very close and turned on New York State, indeed on the city vote. Irish Catholic shock over an illegitimate son was outvoted by outrage over being called the party of rum, Romanism and rebellion. Cleveland squeaked in, as if by the tiny wail of a baby.

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