The redoubtable Stan Greenberg thinks we really will have a third party candidate of some kind in 2012 but that the candidate won’t do very well:
Somebody will run as an independent in 2012. You don’t have 80 percent of voters saying we’re on the wrong track and not have an independent candidate. In 1992, Ross Perot carried 20 percent of the electorate with a pretty well-defined bloc that tended to be younger, white, male, and non-college. But right now, independents are so diverse that it’s not obvious that anyone could capture all of them.
First off a question: what did the Village make of Ross Perot? I didn’t follow politics so closely in my younger days so I can’t remember. Was Perot treated as a weirdo outsider or a potential centrist savior?
Second: while it may be a given that Lieberman-Scarborough or Trump-Fulani or whatever won’t attract that many actual votes, what are the chances that a third party candidate gets massive Establishment Media support?
I ask because today’s self-styled centrists seem so incoherent and inauthentic. David Broder’s third-party centrist fetish always felt authentic. He’d lived it, devoted his entire life to keeping exactly in the right-center of American politics on any and all issues. When he sang of Evan Bayh and Mike Bloomberg, it was like hearing Robert Johnson moan “O Willie Mae”.
Matt Miller, Tom Friedman, and the rest sound more like a bad cover thereof done by Eric Clapton. They’re not real centrists, they’re people who agree with today’s democratic party about almost everything but want to make themselves bigger than the game. Friedman mostly wants trains and a big gas tax. Miller wants a transaction tax, a huge increase in the highest marginal rate, and a big cut in military spending. Yes, they both top it off with a little of the union bashing and anti-“entitlement” talk that’s become de rigeur for Beltway elites, but it’s mostly either gibberish or something that the federal government has little control over anyway (e.g. public schools).
Today’s dreams of third parties don’t mean anything concrete. Bobo wants a real Broderian movement to fuck the middle-class, but Miller and Friedman want a traditional left-wing party with an elitist Washington face. Just take whatever policies you want — left, right, center, popular, unpopular, whatever — and start dreaming of a third party that advocates exactly these policies.
El Cid
Ross Perot was fetishized as a savvy businessman who was weird but who knew business, and it was his intervention and obsession with the deffsit which made it such a huge issue in the election, “made it” meaning likewise fetishized by the media.
I think in part he just wanted to take down the Bush family.
Pavlov's Dog
Ross Perot = Ron Paul
NonyNony
Yes, they both top it off with a little of the union bashing and anti-”entitlement” talk that’s become de rigeur for Beltway elites
You’re missing the point DougJ.
Their “centrism” is all about the union-bashing and the poor-bashing.
What guys like Friedman want is a Democratic party that doesn’t have so many working class and poor people in it. Then it would be a respectable party that they could belong to. As it stands the Democratic Party has too much riff-raff in it for their sensibilities.
Scott P.
There was a huge interest in Perot at the start, because of the way his candidacy threatened to make the “horse race” go off the usual script. I remember a number of fawning biopics on Perot even before he got into the race — I think 60 minutes did a spread.
Once he got in the race, though, the reaction was much more ambivalent. His penchant for making nutty, off-the-cuff statements made for good copy, but also made him an easy target. The shine lasted for about four to six weeks, then the honeymoon was over and the media lost any sympathy for him.
kindness
Eric Clapton doesn’t do ANY bad covers. Pick a different artist buddy.
Big Baby DougJ
@kindness:
Sorry, I don’t like his blues covers.
Baud
Lucky for you, I speak Elitese:
They are looking for something swanky and civilized, so, no, the Democratic Party will not do.
jayackroyd
Weirdo outsider, with a funny voice and stupid charts.
different-church-lady
Yes.
dmsilev
I think we’re more likely to get a significant third party on the right, rather than in the center. Particularly if Romney gets the nomination; there seem to be a considerable number of the shrieking conservatives who have almost as little regard for Romney as they do for Obama.
John X.
Perot’s stock dropped with the media pretty soon after he started to seem like a real threat. What gets forgotten is that his big push came when he went around the media and bought a half hour of network time where he spent the time discussing his issues:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERlGndQ_xtM&feature=related
I don’t agree with all his politics – he’s the man behind the deficit craze – but he’s a definite example of a third-party candidate that got swarmed by the media. They pretty quickly jumped to define him as “crazy.”
It didn’t help that Perot dropped out and then came back. He did this because he claimed that “dirty tricks” teams were harassing and threatening him and his family. The media used this to paint him as a paranoid lunatic.
I kept coming back to that during the Bush years. In light of the things we now know, like the Florida “riot” over hanged chads, I wonder if Perot actually got smeared for telling the truth.
eyelessgame
1. The weird thing about Perot was that Bush I always had between 30% and 35% support, regardless of whether Perot was in the race or not. Newsweek published a fantastic tracking poll graph in November 1992, just after the election, that demonstrated the clear pattern – Perot and Bush and Clinton were running about 30-30-30; when he dropped out, Clinton went to 60%, and stayed there till Perot came back in – at which point Perot’s support came almost exclusively from people who were otherwise backing Clinton. Nobody ever seems to look at the numbers. (It doesn’t help that that was just before everything wound up on the internet and that I can’t find that data anywhere anymore.) It’s also probably the case that Perot *intended* to hurt Bush, but there’s no evidence that that was what he actually did.
2. A third party candidate next year, however, might be the salvation of the country – if Mittens wins the R convention and the teahadeen split away to follow Bachmann or Cain or Perry or Pa*l. OTOH, if the third party candidate is Nader again or someone like him, we’re all Mayans now for real.
Ben Cisco
Laughed so hard at this I almost wet myself.
__
No, not that way you sickos!
Roger Moore
@El Cid:
That wouldn’t explain why he ran again in 1996. I think he ran because he had a huge ego, had run out of challenges in his business career, and wanted another thing to occupy his attention.
Nevgu
Check out my interview on the Dick Cheney protest in Vancouver.
http://youtu.be/AZS6Klex6eM
They didn’t show my sign unfortunately.
Dick Cheney
is NOT Welcome
in MY CANADA
Comrade Dread
Truly the solution to having two parties that are largely beholden to corporate fatcat douchenozzles is for a corporate fatcat douchenozzle to create a third party that represents his interests.
10 Head meet brick wall.
20 Go to 10
Redshift
I don’t recall Perot being treated as anything but kind of a nut, but my memories may be from later in the campaign. Much mocking of his charts and low-production-values campaign infomercials.
I have no problem with a third-party candidate in the race, as long as he/she is on the right and/or appeals to the GOP white male constituency. ;-)
I also have to say I don’t think much of Greenberg’s “But right now, independents are so diverse that it’s not obvious that anyone could capture all of them.” That’s true, but I don’t think it’s any more true now than at any time in the recent past. I don’t think there’s any basis for saying that independents were more homogenous in ’92; it’s just that Perot captured a fairly homogenous subset of them, as any third-party candidate is likely to do.
The thing that political analysts like to ignore (to make things seem more exciting) is that “independents” consist mostly of people who almost always vote Democratic, people who almost always vote Republican, and people who are disengaged enough that most of them don’t vote at all.
slag
@eyelessgame:
N of 1….My only significant political accomplishment in life was talking my mother into voting for Ross Perot instead of GHWB. I was too young to vote at the time, but I remember how much I just loved that dude’s charts. Loved em!
Big Baby DougJ
@Redshift:
Also too, he was in fact a nut. That story about the Viet Cong hiring the Black Panthers to kill him was birther-level.
ChrisNYC
I loved the half hour commercials he did. I was vaguely politically interested at the time but I watched those things with my friends, as a planned thing.
They were fascinating because it was so unusual and also I think he did add a lot to that race. Whether you think he was crazy or not, he did sit in front of a camera and try to explain things (admittedly, the way he saw them), rather than just blah blah nonsense rhetoric. It’s bizarre but “here, lemme lay out the issues to you” stuff is similar to what Clinton is so good at. I don’t know if he watched Ross or if they are both just nuts.
John X.
Perot’s biggest strength, then and now, was that he got how bad free trade would be for middle America. His “great sucking sound” from NAFTA came through in spades, decimating much of small town America.
His deficit fetish was actually more sane, then. It would have been a good thing to tackle the deficit, which is why Clinton gets credit for stealing the issue and making good on it.
On the rest of his politics, he was extremely conservative. Not my cup of tea, but the man deserved more than to be painted as a lunatic.
Loneoak
I was only 12 at the time, but I sure remember Perot being an incoherent weirdo and Stockdale wandering the stage during the Veep debate like a dementia patient in a locked ward.
fasteddie9318
@NonyNony:
The Democratic Party is itself practically foaming at the mouth to jettison said riff-raff in order to appease Tom Friedman. Why doesn’t he focus his attention on getting the Democrats to go through with it? Then they can be his cocktail party and the riff-raff, if we’re even still allowing them the pretense of a vote in this Glorious Friedmanian Utopia, can go form their Dirty Peasant Scum Party and all congregate there.
John X.
That was Saturday Night Live. The real Stockdale debate looks about like what you’d expect if you put a disabled college professor with bad hearing against two polished national politicians.
Catsy
@dmsilev: This has been coming for a long time. You can see echoes of it in the last few elections, but we’re at the point where the extremist reactionary element of the GOP is drunk enough on their own kool-aid and a taste of power that they’re willing to crucify anyone who isn’t a True Believer. And they are driving the GOP primaries.
The electoral viability of the current Republican Party depends on sustaining their ability to ensconce themselves in an alternate reality–it’s a pile of lies that each build on and reinforce each other, and it’s unsustainable in the long run. Sooner or later it will collapse. And it won’t be pretty when it does.
I think you’ll eventually see a right-of-center party that appeals to the remaining sane conservatives and Blue Dogs who feel unwelcome as Democrats, and a far-right minority party of what basically amounts to teabaggers, theocrats and outright racists. How that shakes out is anyone’s guess, but barring some other kind of extraordinary realignment, it’s coming.
ChrisNYC
Other memory from that time — the media being all “he’s super rich but you’ve never heard of him.” Simpler times — that line wouldn’t happen anymore. People are used to shadow billionaires now.
fasteddie9318
@John X.:
Perot brought some of the lunatic stuff on himself with his undeniably erratic behavior. First he’s in, then he’s out, then hitmen are stalking his daughter’s wedding or whatever the hell that was, then he’s back in. He got painted as a lunatic at least in part because he acted loony.
Now James Stockdale, there’s a guy who didn’t deserve what happened to him.
FlipYrWhig
I wasn’t reading alt-media back then, but I’d be curious about how Perot was depicted there. His most resonant issue from a left-ish standpoint was deccrying the neoliberal consensus on trade and globalization — the “giant sucking sound” of jobs draining from the US to Mexico and elsewhere. IIRC he was lashed by DLC-type Democrats for being overly protectionist.
If my recollections are on the right track, a Perotista-ish candidacy might be interesting in 2012 to economic populists who feel neglected by both Democrats and Republicans, and might create fissures between enviros and labor, appeal to some of the Hillary Clinton backers in Appalachian and Sun Belt regions, strike a chord with some of the actual “firebaggers,” and potentially scramble the electoral map. People like those Pennsylvania flood victims from a few threads back would probably love it. I just don’t know who the actual candidate would be. Probably someone like Joe Manchin.
catclub
@Pavlov’s Dog: “Ross Perot = Ron Paul”
I disagree. One of those is a billionaire. See Jon Huntsman’s coverage compared with Tim Pawlenty.
Once thre is a likelihood that the billionaire might hire them, the journalists go all weak in the knees. Explains how Fox news is treated as a news organization. Explains why Donald Trump was treated, however briefly, as a real candidate.
Billionaire == serious
Poopyman
@Comrade Dread: FORTRAN? Your (our) age is showing, man.
Redshift
@dmsilev:
Oh, yeah! That’s why these pundit centrist third-party fantasies are so laughable. It’s kind of a “No True Centrist” fallacy:
1. Most voters are somewhere in the “center” (arguably true)
2. The “center” is the kind of policies I like (almost always false)
3. A candidate who is a True Centrist and proposes those policies will get an outpouring of support, even because being slightly more aligned with voter preferences than existing parties is so exhilarating and zzzzzzz….
fasteddie9318
@FlipYrWhig: I’d be fascinated to see what would happen to a presidential candidate, independent or from either party, who came out publicly and forcefully against “free” trade. They’d immediately become anathema to the aristocracy and the Village Idiots would need to buy a bigger fainting couch, but the support from everybody else might be overwhelming.
danimal
@dmsilev: Spot-on. I see a Constitution Party candidate (or another RW party that already has ballot access) pulling a Nader and gaining 5% of the vote; enough to reelect President Obama and send the Mittster into a frothing rage.
Won’t happen if Perry gets the nomination, though.
Jim Pharo
@dmsilev:
Consider whether the GOP isn’t already that 3d party, and what’s needed is a new party to occupy the left. Obama has led the final stages of the Democratic party morphing into the former non-Bircher GOP. What we really need is a post-Presidential Teddy Roosevelt to launch a Progressive Party to say no to corporatism, at long last.
And to all: I lived through Perot and yes, Ron Paul occupies a similar place in the political firmament, though without all those government billions that Perot had. But it’s a good-enough approximation of the weirdness that was Ross “Can I Finish” Perot.
Baud
@fasteddie9318:
If the Democratic Party wanted to jettison the riff-raff, they would jettison the riff-raff.
jwb
@fasteddie9318: It used to be that the GOP didn’t let anyone know that it had riff-raff. But now riff-raff wearing funny clothes and even weirder ideas has taken over the GOP , and it’s just embarrassing to have to go to parties with those folks. So basically where’s a country club guy supposed to go when both parties allow the riff-raff do more than discretely carry the clubs, serve the wine, and pick up the dishes?
artem1s
Perot was actually a serious candidate who put together a well organized savvy campaign. It was a lot harder to get attention then before the intertubes and the big 3 TV stations handling all the news. He had lots of money and knew what to do with it, mainly hire people to do the work, let them run the thing and show up for the interviews.
He was largely a threat to Bush because of his appeal to the mainstream white voter. Clinton was a complete unknown to much of the country (and MSM) at that time. Perot did grab onto the deficit bandwagon but it’s probably true that he ran mostly to piss on Bush for not being a proper lacky. Perot was pretty infamous for getting targeted tax legislation through Congress that benefited him and only him. And I think there was something about opening up Vietnam for trade between them. Anyway, all kinds of TX bullshit politics played into it.
Perot also had the added advantage of at least appearing to want to win the thing. Most of the likely 2012 3rd party challengers are only in it for the egos and the grift and it shows.
Perot probably would have drawn even more than 19% except for his VP pick. Crazy eyes didn’t go over nearly so well then as today and Stockdale was barely cogent during the Veep debate. Even the Villagers didn’t want to touch him after that.
MikeJ
@Poopyman: Looked more like basic. Wasn’t in proper columns for fortran.
fasteddie9318
@Redshift: Somebody ought to seriously comb through public opinion data and figure out what a real centrist would actually look like. The median voter on each issue seems like the simplest way to do it.
John X.
My point there is that we know a lot more now about how dirty political parties can get. After watching Bush II in power, I actually have no doubt that there were GOP operatives stalking Perot’s family.
They may not have been “assassins”, but do you doubt the party of Karl Rove was beyond scaring Perot’s family? We’re talking about a man who could have “stolen” the presidency from the two major parties. I wouldn’t be shocked if Perot’s bushes were filled with dirty tricksters from both parties, the CIA and the Chamber of Commerce.
The ’90s were a more innocent time.
Anoniminous
I’ll believe in a “Centerist Party” when some Senators, House, and State House critters get on board, there are active state parties in all the states, active county party offices in all the counties, and $1 Billion war chest.
Until then, it’s bullshit.
Redshift
@fasteddie9318:
Indeed. I saw an interview with him not long after the debate, and it was like night and day.
agrippa
I paid very little attention to Perot. I thought he was eccentric and I did not take him seriously.
As for a serious third party in 2012, I tend to doubt it. Obama will be nominated and people like West and Nader are vanity candiates – if they are candiates at all.
As for the GOP, Romney still looks strong to me. I don’t know if RW candidate will show up.
Half the voters do not vote. The largest political party is the Apathy Party.
MikeJ
@fasteddie9318:
John Smith wants to raise taxes on everything you buy. John Smith wants to make it impossible for American companies to sell things overseas.
Wouldn’t last 30 seconds.
Paulk
Perot was actually taken relatively seriously prior to his entrance in the race and he was a serious candidate until he dropped out and even though his support was ebbing with Clinton’s rise that summer, he was still viewed positively by the public. He was, however, dictatorial and fought with this campaign managers, who ultimately resigned, and I think the establishment became somewhat wary.
What changed for Perot was 1) dropping out 2) the same week that Clinton accepted the Dem nomination 3) while claiming that Bush was going to sabotage his daughter’s wedding. His eccentricities came quickly to be viewed conventionally as nuttiness. By the time he reentered the race in October, few people took him seriously (and Stockdale’s debate performance only confirmed those perceptions—not that it was the Admiral’s fault, really).
Chris
@Jim Pharo:
In the sense that Republicans are the far right and Democrats the center, yes. But there wouldn’t be enough support for an actual left-wing party, e.g. one to the left of the Democrats. At least I don’t think so. Last person who tried was Nader, I think we all agree that was a step back…
John X.
MikeJ,
You’d be surprised how many people lost their jobs to “free trade”. There are entire regions where a guy running on “Fuck the Chinese. Bring back the factories” would clean up.
I suspect that’s where the independent right wing 3rd party is going to arise, out of the ashes of free trade. It really has been a disaster for much of the country, and people know it.
Comrade Javamanphil
It’s the suits versus the dungarees and
Les NessmanThomas Friedman knows which side he wants to be on.Poopyman
@MikeJ: I think FYWP eliminates columns anyway. Another strike against WordPress – can’t program in FORTRAN.
FlipYrWhig
@Jim Pharo:
But the Left Party has way too low a ceiling. Could the Left Party get Perot’s 20%? I doubt it. My feeling is that a Left Party would end up being a junior partner to a Centrist Party (like the preponderance of contemporary Democrats) and thus the same dynamic that endlessly frustrates the blogosphere would be reinstated immediately: good liberal ideas pulled to the right by the need to forge a coalition.
What would have more potential for creative destruction would be a Populist Party that sometimes leagued with Democrats and other times with Republicans. You’d have candidates that were to the left of Democrats on some issues and to the right of Republicans on others — like Perot was (at least in my memory).
Or someone like John Fetterman could jolt things in wildly unpredictable directions.
birthmarker
@eyelessgame: Well, I’m pretty CT, but I think the repubs will manufacture a candidate to remove support from Obama if they think they have to do that to assure a win. Nader seems likely to me. Of course this begs the question whether Nader would accept such support which I don’t have the answer to.
Here’s a little blurb from Wikipedia about third party candidates and their successes. Lightly edited for clarity.
“…John Anderson in 1980 received 7% of the vote in the election with a total of 5.7 million votes.[7] He did not carry a single precinct in the country.[citation needed] Anderson’s finish was still the best showing for a third party candidate since George Wallace’s 14% in 1968, and the sixth best for any such candidate in the 20th century (trailing Theodore Roosevelt’s 27% in 1912, Robert LaFollette’s 17% in 1924, Wallace, and Ross Perot’s 19% and 8% in 1992 and 1996, respectively).”
Perot’s showing in 1992 led to Clinton being elected with 43% of the popular vote, which of course set Rush Limbaugh’s hair on fire for a decade.
Catsy
@Jim Pharo:
Do not make the mistake of starting down that rabbit hole.
The main reason I’m hopeful that the GOP splits into a sane right-wing party and an insane right-wing party is because it effectively splits the right-wing vote. I can’t fathom why we’d want to do that to ourselves.
Here’s the problem: Americans identify–on a very rough level–as left-leaning or right-leaning in more or less equal numbers. If you divide the pool of voters on either side of the spectrum between two or more choices, the binary, winner-take-all mechanics of our electoral system almost guarantees victory by the party that does not so divide itself.
It is fundamental, dirt-simple math. The pool of available voters is, in fact, zero-sum. There’s an analogy that I made recently to illustrate this: imagine you have 100 people trying to decide on dinner. Half of them want hamburgers, and are willing to compromise on the toppings; the other half want pizza, and can’t agree on the toppings. When it comes time to vote on dinner, 50 of them vote for some form of hamburger, 30 vote for pepperoni pizza, and 20 vote for cheese pizza. Guess what the pizza fans get to eat?
Baud
@FlipYrWhig:
Wouldn’t it be almost automatic that any viable populist party would be with the Dems on economic issues and with the GOP on social issues?
Judas Escargot
@Loneoak:
(Long Pause) “GRIDLOCK!” (Longer Pause).
Actually, John X has a point. 1992 was the first election I voted in. Time has merged my memories of Perot/Stockdale with Carvey/Hartmann such that I can’t say, for certain, who said what.
I wonder if my brain will do the same for Palin/Fey over the next two decades?
schlemizel
How did the media treat Perot? It was so bad that Ross actually made his campaign song “Crazy”.
He helped it along of course with some eccentricities and sound bites from out in left field. He was Paul without the polish.
Chris
@John X.:
I agree – there’s a goldmine to be made running against “free trade” as conflated with “those scary Chinese who’re buying our whole country and who want to rule the world in our place,” and I think that’s where the next big populist movement is going to be at. Whether it’s right wing or left wing or some weird combination thereof, I can’t say. I fear you may be right that it’ll be right wing.
ETA: and I’m sorry to Godwin this, but what you described, a right-wing populist party based on opposition to free trade from a nationalist POV, sounds a bit proto-fascist to me.
jwb
@John X.: I was shocked on Twitter the other day when a right wing group dropped into my Twitter feed responding directly to a conversation I was having over whether a Romney nomination would cause a third party challenge. In one tweet, one of us wrote the name of the group, no hash, no @, and the group wasn’t following any of us; not two minutes later there was a response denying that they planned to fund a third party challenge. If nothing else, that tells you a lot about the resources they have at their disposal.
catclub
@John X.: “I suspect that’s where the independent right wing 3rd party is going to arise, out of the ashes of free trade. It really has been a disaster for much of the country, and people know it.”
The people who don’t are doctors or lawyers or columnists
or politicians.
trollhattan
I remember Perot mainly for giving Dana Carvey a new character to portray and frankly, I bet SNL was a reason he hung around so long. See, also, too, Tina Fey and the Griftress(tm).
“We’re gonna raise the hood and fix it!“
catclub
@Judas Escargot: “I wonder if my brain will do the same for Palin/Fey over the next two decades?”
optimist! next two years.
cmorenc
@Big Baby DougJ:
Both, but in the opposite sequence in which you have them listed. As of late May 1992, Perot actually led both Bush and Clinton in public opinion polls with an impressive plurality of respondents, and was being taken quite seriously by the media and a huge portion of the electorate. Up to that point, Perot came across as a pragmatic, non-ideological force whose combination of hugely successful business background and immense wealth was viewed as giving him true independence from any status quo power groups, whether on the left or the right. To be sure, his natural tilt was very mildly conservative on the whole, but his approach bore absolutely no resemblance to the current Tea Party whatever. He stood for making government work (not fail) while making it much more efficient, which did imply cutting accumulated deadwood and fat, but there was none of the glibertarian/randoid attitude that government itself inherently doesn’t work. Perot’s repeated theme was that he was going to “get under the hood” of government and fix it, the way a skilled business mechanic would.
HOWEVER, as spring moved into summer 1992, Perot’s eccentric, just a tad paranoid side started emerging. In part simply because he couldn’t hide those facets of his personality emerging into view under the tremendous amount of public and media scrutiny focused on him. However, it’s highly likely that in part, George H. Bush’s political dirty tricks team figured out how to get under Perot’s skin, and for example Perot wound up accusing Bush’s campaign of trying to ruin Perot’s daughter’s wedding that summer. And then there was the unfortunate Vice Presidential debate, where Perot’s designated VP candidate, Retired Vice Admiral Stockdale, proved to be even more disastrously unready-for-prime-time than Sarah Palin sixteen years later, but at least he came across as honest in his immense cluelessness instead of arrogantly ignorant, the way Palin did.
Mike
@Comrade Dread:
>RUN
SYNTAX ERROR IN 10
READY
>_
Southern Beale
I wrote about this yesterday, after reading Matt Miller offer his glorious third party “stump speech” in the WaPo.
This Villager infatuation with a third party is just completely unrealistic. And silly.
Third Parties, now with electrolytes! Pffft.
kindness
In all honesty the talking heads of the MSM who are clamoring for a third party really want something like Nader in 2000.
Then they won’t have to worry about being called racists for cheering the defeat of President Obama at the hands of which ever crazy Teahaddist the Republicans finally nominate.
Seriously, they are closet racists &/or Democrat haters. The arguments for a Centrist party are crap. Now the arguments for an actual Green Party or an actual Liberal Party would make sense, even though they wouldn’t win anything for decades.
geg6
@Scott P.:
That’s pretty much how I remembered it, too. But his nuttiest statements were all such paranoid, insane fantasy that even the usual MSM adoration for billionaires was put aside in his case. I mean, loyalty oaths and fear of nude pix of his daughter ruining her wedding, getting and getting out and getting in again, it was some crazy stuff.
He has some good ideas, though. Gasoline tax, pro-choice, ending outsourcing, love of the EPA, gun control, and disdain for constitutional “originalism” are all good things. Sadly, the bad cancelled out the good: balanced budget amendment, expanding the war on some people who do drugs are all bad. And he voted for the Grumpy Old Man and loves him some Mittster.
I remember that my SO at the time was very high on him. We had some really epic battles over that election. He ended up voting for Clinton in the end, mainly because the crazy stuff Perot pulled made him leery of him as CoC. And, IMHO, rightfully so.
That said, I have to congratulate Mr. Perot on the endurance of the system that Perot Systems created for my employers’ integrated student information system. They built it originally in 1991 and, with some tinkering from our IT people, it runs that system for us to this day. Just got word that we are finally dumping it as soon as we can either create our own or find one out there we like (my bet is we create our own). It’s a pretty good system, but the rebuilds and upgrades it would need at this point (with new federal and state reporting requirements and different needs for the University today) are not cost-effective or efficient for our needs. It sure worked for a loooooong time, though. So I gotta give Perot a tip of my hat for that.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
Somewhat OT: Florida GOP welcomes Log Cabin Muslims much the same way they greet the actual Log Cabin Republicans.
Or in other words: Muslim GOPer proves himself masochistic, gets called ‘terrorist’.
Stogz
Perot was taken very seriously until he sorta whacked out there and withdrew then got back in then got all charty and goofy. I was kinda enamored by him at first, you know, being a young white male with no college at the time (damn how’d they know?) but once he sorta got all paranoid talking about threats against his family and evil Bush this that and the other I gave up on him and got on the Billy Jeff bandwagon. Unfortunately, at about the same time I think the Jennifer Flowers thing broke. I may have the timeline jumbled, but thinking about it now, weird how Perot got all weird and Gennifer Flowers all broke at roughly the same time. H.W.?
Southern Beale
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
When will they ever learn? If you aren’t a rich, white male, Republicans will FUCK YOU UP.
FuzzyWuzzy
Make Ross the Boss!
Paul in KY
@fasteddie9318: Read a funny piece where Ed Rollins was doing campaign work & told Perot that Willie Nelson liked him & wanted to endorse him. Perot was having none of it, calling Willie a pothead & commie (or something like that). Said he didn’t want his fan’s votes.
Rollins told him that without those votes they were toast & that a hell of alot more people loved Willie Nelson than loved him. I think Rollins got out not too long after that.
fasteddie9318
@MikeJ: John Smith wants to stop big corporations from sending your jobs to China. John Smith wants to make sure that companies that do business in America hire Americans and pay taxes in America.
I think it could have some legs except for the fact that John Smith would be outspent on advertising by a margin of, oh, roughly infinity-to-1.
wrb
@Jim Pharo:
Can’t believe that there isn’t a lot of Koch money being flashed at potential candidates on the left.
A 3rd party from the left would complete the right’s takeover of the country.
And they won’t be giving it back.
Southern Beale
I thought Perot’s paranoia-the-destroyer meltdown happened when he ran the second time?
You know, it was a different world then. We didn’t have all of these private organizations and think tanks and clueless media types, everyone foisting their own agenda on the electorate.
Judas Escargot
@Jim Pharo:
This is probably what will happen (IMO of course).
In the long term, the GOP has irreversibly tainted their brand. This is why I’ve been surprised at just how far they’ve allowed the Tea Party to drag them rightwards– it might serve to win in 2012 or 2016, but a few more election cycles and they’ll fade into history.
Vietnam was over 40 years ago, and I still keep hearing about how Democrats are evil because some DFHs spat on returning soldiers. Forty years from now, folks will remember a GOP that booed an active duty soldier asking a valid question while serving in a war zone.
I’m not saying that conservatives as a tribe will go away, that will never happen. I’m saying that the GOP, as a brand, is permanently tainted beyond repair.
FlipYrWhig
@Baud:
I agree — which would present a very hard choice for a lot of left-leaning voters. What do you do with a candidate who runs on putting the Rust Belt back to work, rolling back environmental regulations, ending foreign wars, repealing HCR and cracking down on illegal immigrants? Or a candidate in the tradition of Catholic social justice who is pro-life, anti-same-sex-marriage, anti-death-penalty, pro-labor and pro-immigrant? It’s interesting to contemplate.
FlipYrWhig
@Stogz: Wasn’t Gennifer Flowers a story that broke very early in primary season, though? IIRC Clinton bounced back from that for a respectable showing in New Hampshire, declared himself the Comeback Kid, and kept building momentum. I don’t remember when Paula Jones hit the scene, though.
John X.
Ha. They aren’t that smart.
If the 2000s have taught me anything, the American right is one of most incompetent political movements in history. They can win elections – which doesn’t say much good about the American people – but they pretty much fail at anything they try.
If the right ever completes a full-on takeover of the U.S., it would just start the countdown until the last stock traders flee from the rooftops of Manhattan on U.S. Army helicopters.
jwb
@Catsy: I wish I could find the link for the poll I recently saw that suggested that conservative ID is up to over 40% now, whereas the liberal is right around 20%. Those numbers tell us a lot about why politics are the way they are at the moment.
fasteddie9318
@Paul in KY: Rollins tells that story in his autobiography, which IIRC could have been subtitled: “Why Ed Rollins Should Be Treated as a Knowledgeable, Serious Commentator on the Basis of Having Run Maybe the Easiest Reelection Campaign in American History, and Please Ignore His Series of Monumental Errors Since Then, and Also Too, Fuck Lee Atwater Sideways With a Cheese Grater.” I remained unconvinced after reading it, except about the Atwater bit.
catclub
@Judas Escargot: “Vietnam was over 40 years ago, and I still keep hearing about how Democrats are evil because some DFHs spat on returning soldiers.”
The most likely place for those returning soldiers to be spat on was the local VFW. America Loves a winner, and the VFW even more so.
So 40 years from now, the story will be that DFH’s booed a serviceman in Iraq.
John X.
We did, actually. The 1990s was their high water mark. You can actually thank the think tanks for developing both the policies and sale pitches behind free trade.
The internet cut down on some of the bullshit. At the very least, the engaged can now Google “American Enterprise Institute” and see what they actually represent. That was not possible in 1992.
Stogz
@Baud:
Sick sick sick if this is true. Where are the social libertarians? True freedom is keeping government and other people’s concept of faith faith from dictating our personal decisions. Two people in love should be able to marry. A woman should be able to have full control over the decisions she makes for her body. And if a person wants a drink, a joint or a pill then god bless just as long as they aren’t hurting other people. All that an more, right.
On our side, maaaaaybe just maybe tax credits and other gimmicks to persuade people to act a certain way should be discontinued so we can simplify the tax code. Frankly, I love that our tax code is so progressive, but it makes me sick that so many affluent people are flaunting loopholes. I’d rather make it a tiny bit less progressive if it meant that those making x-times more than my mid-five figures were paying at least the same tax rate I pay, which I think this past year was in the mid-20s? I need to ask my wife since she does all the hard figgering. ;-) But my point is the same. Why should these fictional job creators get away with paying an effective tax rate of like 15% or less while my wages are getting a higher percentage taken out. Eff dat!
KG
The problem that all these people clamoring for a third party have is that they don’t get how a third party could come to challenge the status quo. It can’t be top down, it has to be bottom up. An independent or third party president (or even governor in most States) would have no power base to work with Congress. S/he couldn’t rely on having a majority or minority in Congress that could introduce legislation. It would be damn near impossible (there’s a reason why the last independent president in US history was some cat named Washington).
But, if you start at the state legislature or local level, you might have a chance. Sure, you’re going to have to caucus with one of the major parties to start, but if you start to build a presence, you might have a chance. Especially if you end up in a coalition style government. Then you run candidates for Congress and at the State level. You run for president last, not first.
Baud
@FlipYrWhig: It seems to me that all choices are hard choices for left-leaning voters.
lacp
@Redshift: Larry Sabato? Is that you?
Lockewasright
Clapton is God. His blues are among the best ever recorded by anyone. If you need a bad blues cover, pick the guitarist from just about any popular band that got its start after about 1980.
John X.
fasteddie9318,
I don’t where I read it, but some commentator very recently snarked about whether the post-election criticism from Rollins came with the package or was an add-on charge.
The man seems to have never worked for a candidate that he didn’t rip into after the election. I honestly don’t know why he keeps getting hired.
wrb
Krugman has an interesting post on this
Stogz
You may be right. I don’t think I paid much attention to Clinton at first. I was like 21-22 at the time and not hardcore in following politics. Hard to follow close while working 2 jobs and trying to get laid all the time. ;-)
Paula Jones was waaay later if I remember correctly. Like a couple years after the election. It was his pisspoor handling of the Jeeztards in Texas that was all the rage at first then when that died down I think they manufactured the Paula Jones hell.
But, yeah. I really dug Perot’s message at first. A poster here nailed his early message. He was all about fixing the gov, not destroying it, but making it run more efficiently. Maybe Obama should revisit some of Perot’s messaging and steal some of the good stuff. Seems to me it would make a pretty stark line between responsible governance and the Tea Party poopoo panties.
wrb
I think I edited the offending word but I’m still in moderation
Elie
@KG:
..You are so right…
And also remember, coalition governments do not necessarily lead to good things. (see Israel where a vicious minority have dominated the majority on Palestinian policy decisions forever). There is no one structural “fix” that still does not require work to make sure justice, fairness and democratic values persist. No easy solutions — ever.
Southern Beale
@John X.:
Good point. PNAC and all that … I guess all of that stuff was going on behind closed doors. Now it’s out there for everyone to see.
I guess the nutballs didn’t have quite the national platform. Now there’s a nationwide network of nuttiness. Limbaugh used to be a fringe guy, now he’s got a nationwide audience. I dunno. Things SEEMED simpler back then.
* sigh *
Also, offa my lawn.
fasteddie9318
@John X.:
Reagan. He blames Reagan’s second term and his own downward spiral after the 84 election on everybody but Reagan. Atwater mostly, but GHW Bush, Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan (who single-handedly prevented him from winning all 50 states in 84, dontcha know?), James Baker, Don Regan, and a cast of thousands all worked together to ruin his career, because he was so important and smart and tell-it-like-it-is and something something. Most everybody he bitches about is a supreme piece of shit in their own right, so whatever, but that doesn’t mean that Rollins isn’t also a piece of shit.
Southern Beale
In other news, watch Canadians give Dick Cheney a war criminal’s welcome …
rikryah
that’s how I see it too.
Jewish Steel
EC’s Love In Vain is pretty good. One of the reasons he’s a loathsome hack is because he can play good, but chooses not to.
Davis X. Machina
@kindness: A third party would be a godsend — its left-ness or center-ness is negotiable. They want the corpse of the Obama administration… they also want someone else’s fingerprints on it. I’m betting Beckett features prominently in their Netflix queues.
Deniability. It’s what’s for dinner.
harlana
all this talk about Perot takes me back to Clinton’s election and i’m getting all misty-eyed; no, don’t spoil my flashbacks with facts people, just let me remember how much better things were back then because, yeh, they were a hell of a lot better (and i was a lot younger and better looking); i never dreamed we’d be where we are now.
Southern Beale
Y’all have got to watch that video of the Vancouver protest. Fast forward past the interviews … I guess the rules are a lot different up there. Protestors took over the sidewalk and people attending the Cheney event had to literally crawl over them. If that were the states police would have arrested everyone for being a pubic nuisance or some such. Amazing.
wrb
EC was a great blues guitarist until he quit smack between Layla and 461 Ocean Boulevard.
All the intensity and emotional articulateness left.
The most emotionally articulate soloists- jazz, rock or blues- most on smack.
Linda Featheringill
@Judas Escargot:
Funny thing about spitting on soldiers. A lot of people tried to back that up and could not find a single soldier that was treated badly by the DFHs. Most often, they were greeting with “You okay, man?”
I think the spitting was made up whole cloth. Or maybe it was a projection.
kindness
@Davis X. Machina: Amen!
Paul in KY
@fasteddie9318: I like your revised subtitle. Did think story was funny.
Also, fuck Lee Atwater with a rabid weasel, backwards.
Paul in KY
@Lockewasright: Check out his politics. He’s pretty right wing.
Can play the guitar a bit, I’ll grant you ;-)
Jewish Steel
@Jewish Steel: My mistake. His Love In Vain’s pretty weak. His Ramblin’ is quite good.
daveNYC
@Catsy:
Not gonna happen. Forming a second right-of-center party would split the vote, thereby allowing the Democrats to win. No matter how nutty the far-right fringe gets, the ‘mainstream’ Republicans have zero interest in making a move that would seriously knock them out of power for an election cycle or two.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
wow, the innertubes works in airplanes!
singfoom
I just wanted to pop in here and say I’m a big fan of Matt Miller. I love KCRW’s Left Right & Center, and I thought his book “The Tyranny of Dead Ideas” was good in terms of looking at assumptions that a lot of us hold without examination, though I didn’t agree with all of his points.
/ducks
cleek
@Davis X. Machina:
this, exactly.
everyone knows the GOP is batty, but if you want a really change they’re the only alternative.
solution: Unicorn Pony Rainbow Hard Choices Party!
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@jwb: Playing my pedantifier role here: Discreet = unobtrusive or quiet, while discrete = separate or distinct. I just can’t help myself sometimes. In this case, however, it kind of works, as the country club types certainly like to keep the riff raff both separate and in the background – mustn’t get too close as it might be catching.
KG
@Elie: coalition governments in parliamentary systems often depend on party unity. I don’t know how Israel’s parliament is structured (if it’s one where you vote for individual candidates or for parties – basically is it Anglo or Continental?). In the Continental system with proportional representation, the parties have a lot more control – the higher up the slate you are, the better chance you have of being in parliament. In the Anglo, first-past-the-post system, the parties are naturally less strong.
MattR
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Some Louis CK for you.
Litlebritifrnt
OT – not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet but Rush Limbaugh is playing the “angry black guy” card today. Sick fucker. ETA can’t spell my own damn handle!
Catsy
@daveNYC: Not to put too fine a point on it, but the “mainstream” wing of the GOP doesn’t have a whole lot of say in the matter. If the fringe teabaggers decide the GOP is too RINO for them and split off to form an actual “Tea Party”, what are the “sane” Republicans going to do to stop them–aside from moving further right to try to keep their vote?
It’s like the Dems and the Naderites.
Davis X. Machina
The answer — vote absentee for the Liberal Democrats. And awesome Nick Clegg.
Geoduck
I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it was Palin who runs as an independent. She can keep hoovering the cash off the rubes without attending any debates, and without having to worry about actually winning and doing work.
cleek
@Geoduck:
rubes? hell, i’d support her, if she did that.
split the GOP vote? yes, please!
Chris
@Linda Featheringill:
I’m going with projection. One of the foundation stones of right wing politics, for a simple reason – if you believe heinous things about your opponents, that gives you license to do heinous things to them, which is ultimately the point.
wrb
Krugman has an interesting post on this
harlana
@Southern Beale: @Southern Beale: haha! that’s great – i will check it out when i get home – had no idea any of this was going on
goblue72
I recall from that election there was a brief period where Perot was treated seriously – up until he was stacked in the debate box against Clinton and Bush and he started looking like a complete loon.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Rut ro, they just came on the intercom looking for a MD, Nurse or EMT.
daveNYC
@KG: Continental. And some of the parties are so specialized that they make our GOP look reasonable.
Neddie Jingo
@Big Baby DougJ:
Can blue men sing the whites?
Lynn Dee
Well, I do remember this: At some point during the 1992 campaign, new editions of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Little Men were issued. David Letterman did a bit where he showed copies of the two books, followed by a third book, Little Crackpots, with a picture of Ross Perot on the cover. It was hilarious. :D
harlana
hope Cheney gets Canadian hippy-stinky all over him!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
IIRC, one of the key components of Perot’s initial platform, which he commissioned and didn’t seem to know much about or be very interested in, was a 50 cent/gallon gasoline tax. He just ignored and resorted to a lot of folksy tripe about “gettin’ under the hood and fixin’ what’s wrong”
jwb
@Geoduck: If Palin runs as a third party candidate, it will only be because she’s being financed by someone who wants Obama to win. Much more likely is that she’ll enter the race if it looks like Perry will beat Romney.
Ash Can
@Southern Beale: I wish the Canadians really had given him a war criminal’s welcome — as in, the government sending law enforcement personnel to meet him at the airport with handcuffs and squad cars.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
and if no one’s mentioned it, Mike Allen has the answer, and it’s not those hippies Friedman or Miller, it’s (reading between the lines) Romney/Ryan ’12
The “Coke dude” is the CEO of Coca Cola, who thinks his taxes are too high, and we need a business friendly gov’t. Like China’s. I wouldn’t have thought the Politico honchos would go in for ALL CAPS.
John X.
One thing I’m realizing is that John McCain v. 1.5 was right. It is all about campaign finance.
What we are seeing is a massive populist upswell of anger looking for a leader to rally behind. I suspect the actual politics will matter less than the message, which is pretty scary to think about.
In the good old days, there would be hundreds of national politicians looking to run in front of this wave and claim it as their own. Since the wave is rising against the very companies and organizations who finance all national and state level elections, this isn’t happening.
No one wants to be the first to push all that money away. Look at how hard Wall Street has hit back at even the most milquetoast criticisms from Obama. They aren’t going to let the politicians they own turn against them.
That dynamic is putting our politics in a bad way.
daveNYC
@Catsy:
Um, exactly that? They’d be faced with two choices:
1) Drift further over the edge, hopefully manage to ride the tiger for another couple of elections.
2) Tell the nutters to get bent, and end up definitely being kicked to the curb then and there, either through a primary or with a split vote in the general.
No Republican is going to be the first one to risk losing their seat like that. Though to be fair, no anyone would likely be willing to sign up for that.
And it’s not even close to the deal with the Democrats and Nader. The numbers aren’t in the same time zone, and Team Nader, if there is such a thing, isn’t running around threatening to primary sitting Congresscritters.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I remember liking Perot until he went loony and after that going for Clinton and never looking back. Even though his son makes Bush I look like an elder statesmen Bush I was total clueless dork always waging wars because he felt he was seen as a wimp. That’s what makes the right’s mem that Clinton “stole” the election so ludicrous, no one wanted another term of Bush I.
Culture of Truth
No one has mentioned the Gore / Perot debate on Larry King?
It helped make Gore’s reputation and led to Dana Carvey’s tag line “Can I finish?!”
KG
@daveNYC: I don’t know… isn’t that basically what the GOP did in ’64? Any reasonable person had to know that LBJ wasn’t going to lose and they figured they might as well let the crazies nominate one of their own to show what happens when you get too far off the national reservation. Nixon ran as something of a moderate, again, in ’68, and had a lot of things go right on the Democratic side (from his perspective at least).
jwb
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Personally, I think Coke guy should be encouraged to move to China.
John X.
Yeah. We really want to live in a nation run by Coke:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Criticism_of_Coca-Cola
ET
LZ Granderson must be generating some heat with his “Stupid voters enable broken government” commentary ’cause CNN now has a video.
Alex S.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Haha, oh yes, please…
I think that ‘the system’ values politicians by their ability to convince the middle and lower class to vote against their own interest. And Romney is just not credible enough. He wouldn’t be able to sell the privatization of Social Security. Of course, Ryan is a possibility. He has the conviction of a true believer. But so far, every attempt to change Scoial Security has met with fierce resistance from the voters, Perry was the latest victim (at least among independents).
Xulon
Perot made a splash as a no-nonsense businessman. One example was a couple of his employees were taken hostage in Iran at the same time as our embassy. Perot hired some mercenaries who went into Iran and rescued them. Big deal and significant contrast with Carter’s inability to get our people out.
I thought he had a chance as a candidate until mid-summer when he abruptly quit the race. A few days later when he got back in, he said that he quit because the CIA (or FBI) was going to embarrass him by publishing nude pictures of his daughter. I think he lost a lot of respect there.
Scott P.
As Minnesotans found out when they elected Jesse Ventura.
Yevgraf
@Nevgu:
As long as you’re celebrating anti-teatard ridiculousness, can you please eleucidate which BC provincial statutes or Vancouver municipal laws Dick Cheney broke? I mean, Jesus, I hate the guy as much as anybody and would love to see him locked up like Slobodan Milosevich, but your expectation that a provincial cop should arrest an international figure based on the sepulchural ramblings of a deep-thinking left intellectual fucknut are somewhere out there in Hamsherland.
Emma
@John X.: And Perot wasn’t either ballsy enough or rich enough to hire his own goons to protect his own family? The whole thing about his daughter’s wedding was priceless wackaloon.
Davis X. Machina
@Scott P.: Sent A Message, though. Changed Minnesota politics forever. I mean, politics is primarily a form of self-expression, isn’t it?
John X.
Yevgraf,
Canada is a signatory to the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Torture is very much illegal there, and they have the authority to arrest war criminals.
This is why Kissinger doesn’t leave the country too much. Also why Pinochet got got.
MikeJ
@KG:
You can’t count on assassinations every time though.
John X.
Emma,
Maybe. But I’m not as “that’s just crazy talk” like I was in the 1990s.
That era was open season for dirty trick politics. I would say that we’re happy to be beyond it, but it seems the alternative is that all those nasty little regional races that the media pretended not to notice is nasty national races that the whole world notices.
Judas Escargot
@Linda Featheringill:
Fair enough: I was in diapers at the time, so I have zero first-hand knowledge here. I’ll defer to people who were actually there.
But I do remember hearing that damned anecdote all throughout the 70s and 80s, and it was always directed against liberals to show how unpatriotic they were. It did seem to convince a lot of vets to go Republican when 1980 came. So, true or untrue, the truism was effective.
What I want is for the GOP to start paying, politically, for bad behavior. There will be no change in direction until that loop is closed, so to speak. So I’d like to see these GOP audience reactions become mythologized in the same way: Except, this time, the source of the myth would be demonstrably, undeniably true (thank you, YouTube).
There any many reasons the GOP forfeited any claim to being the better party for national defense some time ago, but explaining this to people in a mere soundbite is impossible. That video, however, goes right to the brainstem in a way that rhetoric and arguments never can.
Time will obviously tell, but I expect that clip to become as iconic as the “have you no sense of decency, sir?” clip that’s supposed to have killed McCarthy’s career so many decades ago.
Yevgraf
@John X.:
Would that not be a more appropriate issue for the Canadian federal government to take up, or do you want this left to the Canuck version of Sheriff Buford T Justice?
I say this because as we speak, Joe Arpaio’s teatard trash goons are taking up Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and I would really like to see if the same fuckwits who’ve blown the public image of progressive causes over the course of four decades can realize that they are, once more, fucking up by failing to see the sort of thing they’re energizing.
I’m thinking that the spark is going to come there – all it needs is an application to one teatard state judge in Arizona and one arrest warrant to set up some form of violent confrontation that will get out of hand nearly immediately.
cleek
@Yevgraf:
that was beautiful.
Southern Beale
I love it when conservatives engage in a circular firing squad: Red State has backed down from its Meghan McCain parody blog after her lawyers sent a sternly worded letter …
gogol's wife
@harlana:
I am not a Clinton lover, but I also look back with fond nostalgia to a day when I picked up the New York Times and thought, “Gee, the world is boring. Nothing ever happens any more.” During the Clinton administration. Wish I could have that feeling back.
John X.
gogol’s wife,
Yeah. It was an era when someone could write a book called The End of History and not get laughed out of the room.*
* Fukuyama really should have been laughed out of the room. Him and Samuel Huntington did a lot to lay the philosophical groundwork for the Bush years.
wrb
@Judas Escargot:
I was a precocious NY Times and New Yorker reading pre-teen during most of the war and I do have, graven in memory, a number of photos of soldiers being screamed at by those ugly vein-popped faces only achieved by screaming protestors.
It sure looked like there was spittle flying, even no one hawked up a big goober.
catclub
@Davis X. Machina: was Bachmann first elected in the same election cycle as Jesse Ventura?
Changed indeed. Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Walter Mondale.
Now, Al Franken!
JoshA
@El Cid: But I think that “Serious businessman” coverage changed once he accused GOP operatives of dirty tricks. At which point, the media started saying “oh man this little elf crazy!”
harlana
@gogol’s wife: funny, what i’d give to be that kind of bored now!
JPL
@gogol’s wife: What? I must be reading your comment wrong because the first bombing of the World Trade Center happened under Clinton. He continually bombed Iraq and Israel was constantly in the news for bombs. Embassies were bombed and Lockerbie had a plane explode over it’s town. Oh and there was a movie called Blackhawk down made.
I know you are being sarcastic so I only typed a few of the world events.
daveNYC
@KG: There’s a big difference between letting the base nominate a grade-A nutter for a seemingly unwinnable election (which 2012 isn’t), and splitting the party. All good D&D nerds know that you never split the party.
John X.
I’ve seen those photos. Those aren’t “soldiers”, they’re National Guardsmen who were actively suppressing protestors with bayonetted rifles. There is a huge difference.
Shockingly, this abuse got worse after Kent State.
agrippa
I am undecided about whether or not the ‘tea party’ – the long standing RW faction of the GOP under a new name – actually wants to get elected and to govern. I do not think that very many of them have any idea how to govern. It looks like a lot of anger and fear are being acted out.
Politics and governing are two sepatare matters altogether. Frequently, politics and governing are in conflict.
I am not sure if the ‘left’ – especially the internet left – actually wants to govern either. I am not sure if many of them know how to govern either. Some seem to be in the old ‘speaking the truth to power’ frame of mind.
Calouste
@Yevgraf:
Slobodan Milosevich is locked up 6 foot underground. I’m not quite sure that is what you intended to convey.
wrb
@John X.:
Could be.
I only retain the images, not the captions
Davis X. Machina
@catclub: No, no! Electing Jesse didn’t just Send A Message, it Freed Minnesota from the Shackles of Party!
Jenny
They hate him. They tore him a new one everyday.
They couldn’t stand the fact that he was against the first Gulf war and he was against NAFTA. Also, at the time the Village thought his goal of balancing the budget was frivolous.
So I guess the lesson is if you’re gonna run as a 3rd party, you’d better support the Village issues.
wrb
@Calouste:
It fits with the choice of “sepulchural .”
John X.
wrb,
If it is a line of armed men in green uniforms facing a group of protestors, they weren’t military. It would be an active violation of federal law for actual soldiers to be in that situation – posse comitatus and all.
schrodinger's cat
For how much longer is this country going to be haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam?
KG
@daveNYC: I tend to see 2012 as unwinnable for the GOP. The electoral college and recent state polls aren’t kind. Obama looks to have Pennsylvania in his column, which means the Republican must flip Nevada, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, plus hold Missouri and Arizona. That’s a very tall order.
And I’m not sure it would actually split the party. I think the end result would be like it’s always been “look, we nominated the guy you wanted and he got trounced, how about we start nominating a guy that people will actually vote for, since that is how you actually win elections, what do you say?” It could mean a more sane/responsible Republican party. But who know?
John X.
What’s the average lifespan for someone who was older than 12 in 1968? 78 years?
So, we’ll be done with that sometime around 2034.
some guy
Dick Cheney travelled to a foreign country? I guess he’s getting braver as the years roll by.
MikeJ
@schrodinger’s cat: Another 20 years ought to kill off most of the remaining people who remember it. There will still be some left, but the youngest of them will be pushing 80.
wrb
John x,
That fits.
Sounds like if it occurred, it was very unusual:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spitting_Image
Canuckistani Tom
@JPL:
Lockerbie was 21 December 1988, at the very end of Reagan’s 2nd term.
daveNYC
@agrippa:
What they want is control. Whether that means governing or just being the boot stomping on a human face — forever, is a seperate issue.
Poopyman
@schrodinger’s cat:
Christ, we’re still haunted by the ghosts of The Civil War.
birthmarker
@John X.: This is what I thought too. Crowd control isn’t exactly the same as getting spit on while walking through an airport.
Someone debunked the spitting in a book I have read, but the book and author have escaped memory now.
BTW I denounce all spitting on people.
wrb
@schrodinger’s cat:
Or the period when the feminist revolution got a bit hostile to men?
I’m convinced that Rush, along with a lot of his fellow travellers, is still powered by the revenge he seeks for some rejection by a young woman who was caught up in emerging feminist theory
Svensker
@John X.:
Speaking as someone who was a hippie during that period, I hated the returning soldiers. Not quite sure exactly why, since I was vehemently opposed to the draft and felt horrible that guys were being forced to go fight. But I hated the soldiers. Didn’t spit on any of them, but might have if given the opportunity.
That feeling didn’t last long, but certainly pertained during the early Nixon years.
Poopyman
@some guy:
Braver? Hardly. Not Dick. You can be sure that he had assurances – probably in writing – before he ever made
hotelcrypt reservations.schrodinger's cat
@Poopyman: So is the answer, never? That is disheartening…
Culture of Truth
The spitting hippie has great truthiness
Sly
The political press is the way it is because they are operating under the assumption that they are the true representatives of America’s national political culture. There is a fundamental problem with this assumption that serves as the basic foundation for all the stupid shit they write:
The United States doesn’t have a national political culture.
Never has. Never will. Were a mishmash of constantly evolving political cultures that define themselves through the prisms of geography, ancestry, religion, and economics. Sometimes some of these cultures come into alignment and we see a coalition form, but they do not last very long (about thirty years tops) and the deck is always in the process of being reshuffled.
When I was a kid, I would often have conversations with God. Then when I hit what George Carlin called the Age of Reason, it kinda dawned on me that the God I was conversing with held all the same opinions, biases, preconceived notions, and judgements that I did. I wasn’t really talking with God, I was really just talking to myself.
That’s basically what Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Richard Cohen, and all the other national(ist) opinion-makers are doing. Just instead of God, they think they’re talking with America as if it were an individual person with a coherent and internally consistent set of political beliefs and is above the petty bickering of… GASP… sectionalism. Which, by sheer coincidence, just so happen to match their own beliefs.
Poopyman
@schrodinger’s cat: I wonder whether a house divided against itself can ever be made whole. It may be that only when the house is gone will there be “closure”, a great forgetting rather than a healing.
Elizabelle
Word.
Kyle
A hypothetical arrest would probably fall to the RCMP, if they aren’t busy electrocuting people to death at Vancouver Airport.
John X.
birthmarker,
I think it’s important to note that the National Guard had a far different reputation then than it does today. The Guard was not sent abroad but rarely. The military had draftees for those duties.
Instead, the Guard of the 1960s was the personal military of the nation’s governors. They had a long history of being used to suppress strikers, protestors, rioters and anyone the governor saw as an enemy. They were pretty much universally hated on the left and not much liked by anyone but the far right.
One of the quiet, but necessary, reforms of the post-1960s was the Army using the Cold War to wrest a lot of the control and oversight of the various Guards out of the hands of the governors.
The governors have responded by relying more on the Highway Patrols and other state-level police agencies to do the dirty work once done by the Guards, but at least those agencies don’t have as many tanks and fighter jets.
wrb
@Culture of Truth:
Hippies, llamas, what’s the difference?
Hairy, hang out where drugs grow, and spit.
Poopyman
OT, but we’re finally going to get our flying cars!
It’s on the internet so it must be true.
Alex S.
Richard Cohen fluffing Rick Perry.
But the way Cohen does it won’t do Perry no good.
Felinious Wench
Anyone who has any questions about Perot just needs to ask about the corporate headquarters of Perot Systems (now a part of Dell) in Dallas. I have never been to a place where it was so obvious how insane the man is running the show. It’s, literally, all over the walls there. Giant pictures of Perot, over the top patriotic themes (yes, it can get scary sometimes), lots of “Live Free or Die.” And Perot was there…with his personal guard of ex Navy Seals, complete with ear pieces. I shit you not. I met him. And it’s a tech company where no jeans allowed, and suit and tie is the norm.
Freakiest place I’ve ever been.
El Cid
@schrodinger’s cat: And by the “ghosts of Vietnam” we never mean the millions of innocents slaughtered in that “era”.
cmorenc
@John X.:
Even paranoid eccentrics can have genuine enemies out to underhandedly get them, and given the long track record of the Bush family for using platoons of dirty tricksters in election campaigns, I strongly suspect that the Bush campaign DID deliberately do covert stuff specifically to provoke Perot into a paranoid outburst that would undermine public impressions of his stability. The Bush campaign believed during late spring/early summer 1992 that they had little chance of winning so long as Perot remained as strong a force in the election has he seemed at the time. The Bushes are one of the most ruthlessly dirty political families of the modern age in American politics.
John X.
Felinious Wench,
I remember when EDS was hired by a local bank back when I was at high school. They came into town dressed like Men In Blacks, always travelled in teams and generally freaked out everyone who came in contact with them.
One of my friends’ fathers was high up in the bank and tasked with working with them. They were apparently all passive aggressive control freaks who tried to boss around their clients and acted like they worked for the CIA. He threw a party when they left and swore that he’d never work with those fuckers again.
Gilles de Rais
The truthiness of the allegation is incontrovertible.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a fist punching a hippie’s face – forever.
different-church-lady
@Poopyman:
Dunno… looks more like BASIC to me.
wrb
188 was toungue-in-cheek btw
Poopyman
BTW, four and a half hours since Uncle DougJ posted? Must be that everybody’s asleep. Time to break into the liquor cabinet ….
schrodinger's cat
@different-church-lady: That’s what I thought too.
schrodinger's cat
@El Cid: Just like no one talks about Iraqis when they talk about that war.
Kola Noscopy
Third party, hell.
I just wish we had a Democratic Democratic Party.
Right now it’s the Center/Right Dems against the Far Right Repubs.
Poopyman
@schrodinger’s cat: Whatever. It would be a perfectly valid snippet of fortran if the code started after column 6, and since WP compresses text I thought it could have been written in that format. I never did that basic crap, so I wouldn’t know.
David in NY
Perot was a liberal on social issues, which nobody seems to remember. He was pro-choice on abortion and felt that homosexuality was a matter of personal choice as well. He was only nuts about a strong dollar and a balanced budget — but oil men seem to have no understanding of economics. (Cf. Dwight Eisenhower — “and they are stupid”).
Calouste
@schrodinger’s cat:
Well, Serbia is still haunted by the ghosts of the battle of Kosovo in 1389, so there’s some time still to go…
Catsy
@Felinious Wench:
Those still exist?
David in NY
@schrodinger’s cat:
Or by the ghost of Marilyn Monroe? She was on the front page of an NY tabloid today. And she died nearly 50 years ago.
So these things last, if people are interested. And the obsessed right wing never forgets. Hell, they’re trying to rehabilitate Jos. McCarthy, not to mention say, William McKinley.
NR
@Catsy:
Well, let’s see. They could heap abuse on them, call them “fucking retards,” and just generally do everything they can to show their complete and utter contempt for those who don’t blindly follow their lead.
Oh, wait. The right would never put up with that the way the left does. So never mind.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@David in NY:
Heh. Did he say that specifically about Big Oil?
Felinious Wench
The thing that freaked me out the most about my visit to Perot was the obvious lack of diversity. White males only. I work in tech, people. We don’t tend to roll that way.
Thought I might be imagining things, so I looked up their diversity rating. Companies score from 0 to 100. Only 2 companies scored a 0. Perot was one.
This was before the Dell acquisition, but nothing has changed as of 2 weeks ago.
gelfling545
@John X.: Given the number of issues still with us from the Civil War, I think you may be overly optimistic.
John X.
gelfling545,
The Vietnam War wasn’t the Civil War. It was just the new Phillipines. Hell, the Phillipines had more, bloodier protests.
And if you don’t know about our glorious war in the Phillipines, that’s part of the point.
divF
@Neddie Jingo: Not in a death cab for cutie.
David in NY
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yes, Ike said about oilmen “and they are stupid” at the end of his quote about no one wanting to do away with social security except a few Texas oil millionaires, “and they are stupid.” Here, I’ll get a cite — http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/ike.asp .
Snopes says, “True.”
Mike G
@Felinious Wench:
After working for Perot Systems in the early 00s, with an authoritarian, paranoid, bullying, feudal/Stalinist culture of suffocating bureacracy, constant intimidation and a creepy personality cult around Perot and Ross Jr (who was CEO at the time, North Korean-style), all my co-workers were really glad he did not become President.
The day I was laid off after a facility closure was the happiest workday I’d had in years. Since then I’ve received payouts from multiple class-action lawsuits based on Perot’s cheating its employees through violation of labor laws on pay and allowances.
P.S. For Perot’s 80th birthday, employees were expected to contribute money to pay for a statue of him to be placed outside HQ in Texas.
BS
Perot was a Naval Academy classmate of my father’s. To a person, everyone who actually spent time around him knew he was batshit crazy, even back in 1949. They were all scared to death that he’d actually be elected. It came as no surprise that his campaign imploded in a cloud of paranoid bullshit. McCain came a bit later, but again, the Naviation community is small, and everyone knew what a train wreck he was as well. Sadly, the Beltway media took both of these clowns seriously.
Paul in KY
@Felinious Wench: I interviewed for a job there back in the mid 80s. The interview & paperwork was more detailed & invasive than my Top Secret-BI clearance stuff had been with the USAF.
Didn’t take job, they wanted me to sign a big pomissary note.
ignatzz
Admiral Stockdale was a fine, fine man whose only crime was a lack of stage ability.
EricT
@artem1s: Ross was head of the POW/MIA program under George senior. He figured out that the POW/MIA program was being used for drug running out of SE asia by the CIA. He confronted Bush, who rebuffed him, resulting in Perot’s immediate resignation. Perot entered the presidential race to take down Bush. He appealed to the libertarian side of the Republican party.
John C
If you ever want a good read on the atmosphere of the 92 election, Hunter S. Thompson’s Better Than Sex is a good read.
redfish
@Big Baby DougJ said: “Also too, he was in fact a nut. That story about the Viet Cong hiring the Black Panthers to kill him was birther-level.”
Actually, I don’t find that too strange to believe.
Perot ran a multi-million dollar campaign in 1969-1970 to release POWs, in which he flew planes to Vietnam. For the first time during the Vietnam War, there was emotional support in favor of the war. It was seen as a coup for the Nixon administration. Perot was so much of a nuisance to the North Vietnamese, that they started a public effort to denounce Perot as a propaganda tool for Nixon, issuing articles to East Asian news sources.
The Black Panthers were a crazy group that advocated violent revolution, which would be willing to do such a thing, and had been influenced by Maoist ideology just as did the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong probably had contacts in the US, just like the Soviet Union did.
Perot claimed two things from personal experience; that an FBI agent informed him, and that some people tried to jump his fence, but were chased off by his dogs. Reporters in 1992 asked Perot’s head of security and the Dallas police, who didn’t know anything about it, and concluded Perot made the story up. But either Perot here is completely lying (not paranoid, but lying), or someone who said he was an FBI agent really wasn’t and the break-in on his property had nothing to do with the Black Panthers.
The second option is believable; very few people know the story about his claims that there were ‘dirty tricks’ by the Bush campaign in 1992, but he actually had a private investigator perpetrate a hoax on him. Scott Barnes, who he worked with on POW/MIA issues, later confessed (in 1997) that he and others were trying to fool Perot into believing it was true. He didn’t coordinate with the FBI on the issue until after the election.
A poll in late 1992, btw, showed that more people believed Perot about the “dirty tricks” than did not. Exit polls showed 36% of the public would have voted for Perot if they didn’t believe they would be wasting their vote, so I don’t know how much that hurt him. The public was leaning towards believing Perot’s charges, because Republicans had been involved in dirty trick campaigns before.
And after all, if you remember in 2000, there was an anonymous whisper campaign against John McCain that he had an illegitimate black daughter. The McCains claimed that it was started by a push poll organized by Karl Rove, which asked if people would think differently of McCain if that were true. So I guess Perot is no more paranoid than John McCain is.
redfish
@Linda Featheringill said: “I think the spitting was made up whole cloth. Or maybe it was a projection.”
I’ve seen this idea being spread on progressive blogs. The argument comes from a 1998 study which claimed to found no evidence of it. To me, it sounds more paranoid than anything Ross Perot ever said. Its weird that it would be so hard to believe that a few anti-war radicals acted out inappropriate behavior, that was not representative of the anti-war movement in general. If anything it was always more likely conservatives were exaggerating how often it happened, and used a small group of people to represent all protesters.
In fact, I’ve talked with people who said they witnessed that type of behavior first hand. I can’t make any claims about their credibility, but there are plenty of documented personal accounts by veterans themselves:
For instance,
http://books.google.com/books?id=3uaVHfytlZIC&pg=PA114
http://books.google.com/books?id=Wt5SdfydqRkC&pg=PA89
http://books.google.com/books?id=86u1Y8sSeiEC&pg=PA85
http://books.google.com/books?id=X2OO_7a92GMC&pg=PA236
http://books.google.com/books?id=gqVuPVOYM60C&pg=PA129
And you’ll find many more if you just do a search. Those are all specific, first-person accounts. Further, there were many accounts of soldiers who referred to themselves figuratively feeling “spat on”, hearing about themselves being called “baby killers”, or hearing from other service members that they were spit on.