In 1992, with his squeaky voice and endless charts, Perot focused attention on the rising federal deficit. His warnings helped keep the major-party candidates from talking budgetary nonsense.
It is true that Perot's insistent focus on the federal deficit changed the dynamic of the Presidential contest; it is generally considered a truism that Bill Clinton saw the rise of Perot as an indication that fiscal restraint coupled with a more limited approach to federal policy innovation as the key not just to winning the White House but keeping it. The now-famous "It's the economy, stupid" sign, plastered around the Clinton campaign in 1992 kept the focus on what the candidate considered the most important issue for voters that year.
Yet, there was more to the Perot boom than middle class concern over budgetary laxity. After eight years of Ronald Reagan and four years of George H. W. Bush, the tensions of the second Cold War, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the demise of the Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf War, and the ideological exhaustion of both major parties in the United States, the public clamored for someone who recognized not only that we were spending ourselves in to oblivion, but that the world of 1992 was fundamentally different from the world of 1988. Politicians were still talking in words and phrases left over from an era that was no longer present. While a crank in many respects, with his leading idea of treating the government as a business from a budgetary and fiscal point of view being the crankiest, Perot nonetheless had the advantage of speaking in a way that was responsive to the desire to hear something new and different and, most of all, relevant, to the American public in 1992.
Of course, the entire Perot movement was highjacked in later years by people even crankier and outside the mainstream than Perot himself. This is saying quite a bit, because in the summer of 1992, Perot dropped out of the Presidential race at the height of both his influence and popularity, claiming among other things that Pres. Bush used surrogates to disrupt his daughter's wedding. Recognizing a fellow-traveler, if not a full-fledged comrade, conspiracy buffs and other assorted fringe elements flocked to him even as regular voters saw the Democratic nominee respond enthusiastically to the demand for a different political discourse.
The fundamental difference between 1992 and 2008 is not a question of policy, either foreign or domestic. In 1992, it took an outsider to shake up both parties, forcing them to realize that the public needed to hear a particular message. The party that responded won. In 2008, the public needed to hear a particular message, and a simple one at that - listen to us, hear our fears, feel our frustration, be responsive. There has been no need for an outsider to change the dynamic of this race, because, at least on the Democratic side (but also increasingly on the Republican side as well), there is a recognition and accommodation for this demand. In many ways, the closeness of the Democratic nominating contest reflects this reality, because both Sens. Clinton and Obama have employed a rhetoric not just of hope and change, but of acknowledging the role of the public in affecting this changed discourse, and the party voters have responded enthusiastically (if sometimes a bit too enthusiastically).
The Republicans, too, are beginning to realize that the ideological exhaustion and practical paralysis of their party is turning away not just voters, but the deep pocket supporters as well, and the word "change" has crept in to Republican Party ads. The problem, obviously, is that most voters, Republican and Democratic, recognize who has been in charge for the past few years, and what "change" would entail. The Republicans also are playing an insider's game. The presumptive nominee is a long-time Washington player, a favorite of the Washington press corps, with ties not just to lobbyists and other players, but with a history of wheeling and dealing. While neither Obama nor Clinton are naifs, their relative newness to the nuts and bolts of Washington politics as well as their continued reliance that at the very least pays lip service to a larger role in the voting public in shaping the dynamics of the Presidential race bode ill for any Republican nominee.
We are in no need of Ross Perot, or any other third party this year, because the public, for the most part, feels that some (at least) of the candidates get it, it being their frustration, their anger, their sense of the disconnect between the current Administration and Congress and the real needs, and political demands of the public.
