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Ross Perot, the self-made Texas billionaire and one of the most successful third-party presidential candidates in U.S. history, died on Tuesday, his family’s spokesperson confirmed. He was 89.
Running as an Independent in the 1992 presidential election, he lost to Bill Clinton, but captured 19% of the vote. He was famous for uniting “both socially conservative, blue-collar, anti-NAFTA voters with fiscally conservative but socially moderate voters,” who wanted a change from the status quo, didn’t trust established political parties and who wanted to reduce the outsize power that lobbyists and special interest groups exert over policy decisions. And significantly, Perot was one of the first candidates in the modern era to attempt to bring his political message directly to the American public using the growing media landscape.
The May 25, 1992, issue of TIME.
The May 25, 1992, issue of TIME. Harry Benson
It all started when he announced his willingness to run for president on Larry King Live on Feb. 20, 1992, if the American people got him registered on 50 state ballots. TIME’s May 25, 1992, cover story called these citizen drives “the largest outpouring of volunteer enthusiasm America has seen since yellow ribbons dangled from every lamppost during the Gulf War…No independent candidate in 80 years has attracted anything like this kind of support.”
The magazine called his campaign “both a symptom of the failure of American democracy and a hopeful beacon of its ability to regenerate itself,” lamenting the professionalization of presidential politics. “Ross Perot in three short months has out of nothing created something far larger than a multibillion-dollar company, or perhaps something even larger than the multimillion-dollar campaign he will fund. Win or lose, his populist crusade and the challenge he is mounting to the establishment parties may well help break the deadlock of American democracy.”
In a Q&A in that same issue, Perot argued that the popularity of his campaign spoke to a larger untapped feeling of voter discontent: “What is happening has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with people’s concerns about where the country is and where the country is going. There is a deep concern out there about the kind of country our children will live in that I don’t believe has surfaced in the polls yet. And if I want 100,000 volunteers more, all I need to do is go on some national show.”
That summer, commentator Charles Krauthammer further analyzed Perot’s media strategy and how his campaign was disruptive, not only in terms of what kind of voters he was appealing to, but also in terms of how he was appealing to them. Here’s how he described the phenomenon in a story headlined “Ross Perot and the Call-In Presidency” in the July 13, 1992, issue:
The Perot phenomenon signifies something larger, deeper. It signifies a geologic change in American politics: the growing obsolescence of the great institutions — the political parties, the Establishment media, the Congress — that have traditionally stood between the governors and the governed. The traditional way to achieve and wield power in America is to tame or charm or capture these institutions. Perot’s genius was to realize that for the first time in history, technology makes it possible to bypass them. Win or lose, knowing or not, Perot is the harbinger of a new era of direct
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