Remembering third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot

SANDWICHED BETWEEN Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush on the presidential debate platform in 1992, Ross Perot looked like a grizzled man-child. At five feet five inches tall, he was almost a foot shorter than the thoroughbred Republican president and Democratic governor. He had to stand—while they slouched on their bar stools—to look them in the eye. A lesser man, running in a different year, might have appeared ridiculous. Yet the Texan billionaire, whose death this week recalls one of America’s strangest and most fateful political careers, thrived on the contrast.

America was in the economic doldrums and, after 12 years of Republican rule, aching for a change that slick Mr Clinton was not quite trusted to deliver. This created an opportunity for an outsider that Mr Perot, pint-size, scrappy and quivering with contempt for both parties (as well as hostility towards the president—a Yankee interloper to his beloved state), seized with hyperactive brio.

He had two major policy impulses, a phobia of debt, on which he blamed most of America’s economic troubles, and an embrace of protectionism. “You implement that NAFTA”, he warned his opponents, “and you’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country.” But his overarching message—the basis for the most successful third-party run in a century—...

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