See Ross Run

Monthly journalism is so unfair. This column is being written near the end of October, which is already more than a week late. You're reading it sometime around Christmas. That means you know this year's big Christmas movies...and I don't. You know who's playing in the Rose Bowl...and I don't. And, oh yeah, you know who the presidential winner is...and I don't.

But whoever takes over as First Co-Signer of the national debt, the most far-reaching and futuristic development of the 1992 election season was plainly the video intervention staged by Ross Perot. He will likely make the strongest showing of any independent candidate in history without following any of the conventional political channels or accumulating any of the conventional political trappings.

Perot's candidacy seemed to spring from the air--or the airwaves, or the cable. It took root on television. One can't help wondering what would have happened if Perot had not indulged himself in that face- (and money-) saving mid-summer duck-out; if he'd run in earnest from the get-go, and spent money the way he did during the October stretch.

The Perot candidacy, for better and worse, is chock-full of content to be analyzed. For one thing, it is fascinating that this lifelong military groupie and Special Ops enthusiast was the only one of the three candidates to talk sense on post-Cold War foreign policy. While Clinton played it "presidential," Perot nailed Bush square in the forehead on his dirty dealings with Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, his trumped-up war in the Persian Gulf, and his felonious lies about the Iran-contra operation.

Perot was the only one of the big three to state forthrightly that keeping troops all over the globe, including in Western Europe, is not in America's national security interest anymore. Perot was also the only candidate, after the defeat of Jerry Brown, to peg the North American Free Trade Agreement for the job-sucking fraud that it is. All of this made a bracing contrast to George Bush's Ivy League imperialism and Bill Clinton's mushy recitations from the pages of Foreign Affairs.

Perot was also correct to drag into the light the bipartisan scandal of the role played by foreign lobbyists and foreign money in the U.S. government. American trade policy, which is in large part our industrial jobs policy, is in effect made by extremely influential members of the Washington establishment whose contacts and influence are hired out (for big money) to our economic rivals, especially Japan.

That's not Japan-bashing. The Japanese themselves would never allow such a situation in their parliament, and they shouldn't. We shouldn't stand for it in ours. Perot's only fault on this question was not spelling the issue out to the TV audience clearly enough, and naming names.

THE DOWNSIDE of Perot-ism was equally obvious. His penchant for simple answers hit the wall on the deficit. His draconian program, the equivalent of the IMF treatment given many Third World countries, could have brought the same results in the United States that it did in Latin America, namely bread riots.

Also, Perot's running mate James Stockdale and his chief handler Orson Swindle made those genuinely frightening and hateful comments about Vietnam War protesters. Perot never said anything that ugly, but the comments did serve to remind us who is really in the inner circle of the Perot movement.

And Perot is a genuinely autocratic leader. He ran a uniquely democratic campaign. And I don't doubt his enthusiasm for the theory and aesthetics of democracy. But his practice will never be truly egalitarian or consensual, which is why he will never, and should never, govern.

But the way that Perot ran was, in the long run, more important than anything he actually said. Perot promised, if elected, to bring America the industries of the future. As a candidate he did bring us the campaign of the future. Perot bypassed the conventional "news system," the journalistic establishment, if you will. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS News, et al. were never high on his priority phonelist.

Instead Perot hatched his campaign on Larry King's CNN talk show, Phil Donahue's daytime syndicated gabfest, and their various radio equivalents. In other words he went around the machinery of power, straight to the people. By so doing he crystallized the public's murky, but essentially true, perception that the official news arbiters are in fact a sort of unelected policy elite.

In a few short weeks, Perot forced the other two candidates out of the media ivory towers and into the video equivalent of mainstreet America. A lot of people seemed to think it was silly and demeaning, especially people in the old media elite. But I think that America's public business does belong on Donahue, and Arsenio, and MTV, too.

The other intriguing aspect of the Perot campaign was his promise to conduct electronic town halls in which he, as president, would go on television for hours at a time, take questions from citizen-callers, lead a discussion of a great public policy issue, and put his policy proposal at the mercy of a toll-free telephone referendum.

This proposal, more than any other by Perot, drove the political elites crazy. Over and over we heard that it would short-circuit constitutional procedure. (They're right.) But those constitutional procedures of checks and balances were instituted by the political-commercial elite of 1787 to keep government, and real power, away from the masses of the people. So maybe it is time that those processes, like the ones that made blacks and women non-citizens, were short-circuited in the name of democracy.

Danny Duncan Collum, a Sojourners contributing editor, was a free-lance writer in New Orleans, Louisiana when this article appeared.