The Billionaire Boy Scout

By MOLLY IVINS AUSTIN MOLLY IVINS, columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the author of the best-selling Molly Ivins Can''t Say That, Can She? (Random House).

Piece of work. H. Ross Perot. He's the best right-wing populist billionaire we've got in Texas, so if you don't like him, you're out of luck.

Everyone wants to know, "Is he serious?" In politics, that means, "Does he have any money?" Friends, Ross Perot is as serious as a stroke.

By and large, Perot has been a good and valuable public citizen in Texas. He is invaluable when he knows what he's talking about. No one has plumbed the depths of his ignorance, but one subject he does know is education, from what's wrong with teacher training to the most arcane reaches of how to finance public schools. Ross Perot has been an unalloyed force for the good. Over the years, he has given enormous sums through his foundation to educational experiments and improvements, though no one knows how much because one of the most attractive things about him is that his philanthropy is usually anonymous.

His good works range from sending in a SWAT team of tree experts to try to save Austin's beloved old Treaty Oak after some nut poisoned it (tree died anyway) to quietly helping the families of MIAS and other veterans.

But he has also mounted some damn peculiar crusades. In the late '70s, he headed up a War on Drugs -- and like everyone else who has ever done so, he lost. This was in the days when first-offense possession of any amount of marijuana was a two-to-life felony in Texas -- wasn't as though you could have got tougher on drugs. Perhaps his most famous crusade was "Tell It to Hanoi!," an effort to succor and free the American pows held by the North Vietnamese in the early 1970s. While Perot focused the nation's attention on the plight of 1,600 American prisoners in North Vietnam, Richard Nixon continued to prosecute the disastrous war in the South, killing millions. "The North Vietnamese cannot understand how we Americans value the lives of even a few men," said Perot.

Perot brought his "Tell It to Hanoi!" campaign to the Texas state capitol in 1971 on what may still be the single weirdest day in the history of that peculiar institution. Jets roared over Austin in "missing man" formation, while beneath the rotunda, in hour after hour of bloodstained oratory, brows were darkened and teeth gnashed over the fate of Our Boys. It was a patriotic orgy, although, as the Texas Observer noted at the time, no one uttered a peep about exactly what Our Boys were doing over there when they got caught. One received the impression that they had been mysteriously kidnapped while distributing gum to small children; almost all of them were professional military pilots engaged in the heaviest aerial bombardment in history.

"Is there any question what our grandfathers and great-grandfathers would have done for 1,600 men held prisoner only a day's ride from Austin?" cried Perot, who then explained that Hanoi was only 24 hours away by air, and we should saddle up, ride out and get 'em. He further urged the State of Texas to deploy a delegation of local leaders to confront the Pathet Lao and the Viet Cong and to demand the release of Texas POWS. Our then Governor, known to all as POP Smith, for Poor Ol' Preston, was intellectually challenged by the task of getting from the Mansion to the Capitol every day. You could almost hear the entire legislature gulp at the mind-boggling prospect of POP Smith debating the Viet Cong.

Ross Perot is fundamentally a superb salesman. So superb that it amounts to a form of genius. Over the years, he has become far more sophisticated in his analysis of political issues, but he retains the glib salesman's tendency to reduce complex realities to catchy slogans. In the old days, he advocated, as a cure for poverty, teaching the Boy Scout Oath -- to do my best, to do my duty, to God and to my country -- to every child in the ghetto. Let's face it, it's not sufficient.

He is still given to the sort of sweeping statements he made 20 years ago: "Pollution? That's an easy one. No question about it . . . Give me the choice of having all those industries dumping pollutants into the rivers or the choice of having no factories, and I'll have the factories. I can clean up the rivers in five years."

This is not a man who has grasped the concept of dead oceans. American Perot-nistas bear a superficial resemblance to the Argentine variety. What we have here is a strongman, a right-wing populist: no party, no program -- just a cult of personality. All he needs now is an Evita.

Once when Juan Peron was returning (he was always returning), the Peronistas stopped cheering after he had passed by and commenced shooting one another, having nothing in common other than their allegiance to Peron. One suspects the Perot-nistas (the coinage is by novelist Peter Tauber) will have the same problem, though one trusts not as dramatically.

It's hard to envision a seriously short guy who sounds like a Chihuahua as a charismatic threat to democracy, but it is delicious to watch the thrills of horror running through the Establishment at the mere thought.

There is always a superficial attraction to the notion of an outsider coming in to clean up a corrupt, wasteful political system. "Let's send Ross Perot up there," cries Bubba. "He knows how to kick ass." Successful "bidnessmen" have been running for office in Texas for years on that appeal: "Vote for me; I've met a payroll; I understand the bottom line." We have been plagued in recent years by rich guys bored with making boodle who decide to take up public service instead. An entirely commendable impulse, but why don't they start by running for the school board or the county commissioners' court? Why do they always want to buy the governorship or a senatorship? Or, in the case of Perot, who's richer than God, the presidency? It's enough to make you yearn for the good old days, when rich guys just bought racehorses and yachts.

Because when these rich guys get into office, we find they're disastrous as political leaders. They're so accustomed to working in hierarchical, top-down organizations -- where they can fire anyone who doesn't jump high enough -- they go berserk with frustration when nobody jumps at all. You can get elected Governor, but you can't fire the legislature, or even the Egg Marketing Advisory Board. Our last Big Rich Governor was Bill Clements, '87 to '91, who, when he tried to learn Spanish, inspired the observation, "Good, now he'll be bi-ignorant."

It's a rotten year to try to defend generic politicians, but the critical political skills -- negotiation, persuasion, compromise, coalition building, patience and the willingness to listen to fools more or less gladly -- are still minimal requirements in public office. The ability to kick ass, one finds on sad assessment, is not often useful.

The last master politician we elected to the presidency was Lyndon Johnson. If you set aside the war in Vietnam (which, I grant you, is a lot like saying, "If it hadn't've been for the Hundred Years War, that would've been a swell century"), Johnson would certainly have gone down in history as one of our greatest Presidents. (Couldn't have passed a single character test yet devised, either.) But what L.B.J. did know was how to get the whole, huge Rube Goldberg contraption we call government to work. He knew which buttons to push and which levers to press; he knew what knobs to pull, where to apply oil and when to haul off and just kick the damn thing in order to get it to crank around and churn out something that would help people.

Bush, who was advertised as "Ready on Day One," may or may not know how to get the machinery of government to work, but since he clearly has no ideas about what he wants it to do, the point is moot. Look, we're all desperate for an alternative this year. Perot is appallingly straight -- he truly is out of Norman Rockwell by the Boy Scouts -- but that doesn't mean he'd make a good President. Nor is he without flaw. For one thing, he's the world's first Welfare Billionaire; he made his gelt by using computer software developed by the government, and then he charged the feds handsomely for their own invention. The closed-door congressional investigation into those charges will finally get some much belated but long-needed attention. All that and more will come out if and when he runs.

In the meantime, you Perot-nistas can console yourselves with what I believe is a heretofore utterly unreported fact: H. Ross is a genuinely funny sumbitch. I often teased him in my old Dallas Times Herald column, reporting outlandish assertions about his activities. ("H. Ross Perot announced yesterday he had purchased the Lord God Almighty, the ancient though still serviceable deity, believed by many to be the Creator of the Universe.") I once announced to an astonished world that Perot is a communist, worse, an agent of the Kremlin, on account of he had attacked the entire foundation of the Texan way of life -- football. Right in front of God and everybody, Ross Perot said the trouble with Texas schools is too much football.

Imagine.

He got into the habit of calling me after these japes to make semi-droll response: "Yew said in yore column my mind is only a half an inch wide. Well, all my friends say yore wrong. They say it's only quarter of an inch." Followed by that Chihuahua bark of laughter, "Har-har-har."

Then one day I put into print a glaring error about Perot. I was holding forth on one of the more devastating imbecilities of the Reagan era, the abolition of the progressive income tax in favor of a two-tier flat tax rate. I ended this screed by observing, "And so you see, if you make more than $17,500 a year, you will not be in exactly the same tax bracket as H. Ross Perot." And then, because my high school English teacher taught me to write balanced sentences, I added, comma, "who makes more than $1 million a year." I knew Perot was Big Rich and figured it was a safe assertion, but I did not check. Next day the guys on our bidness desk in Dallas called, laughing their asses off. "Ivins," they said (you think I'm making this up, but they spoke in tandem), "H. Ross Perot makes a million dollars a day."

Well, kiss my chicken-fried steak. I didn't know Kuwait made a million dollars a day. I'm settin' there thinkin', "Damn. This is gonna be an embarrassing correction." Then the phone rings, and an operator says, nasally, "H. Ross Perot calling collect for Molly Ivins. Will you accept the charges?"

I didn't even have the presence of mind to tell the cheap sumbitch to call back on his own nickel. Perot came on and poor-mouthed, still soundin' like a Chihuahua -- got fired from his job at GM, couldn't get his own company back, and here's me usin' him as an example of some big rich guy; didn't I even read my own newspaper, etc. It was the funniest gotcha anyone ever pulled on me.

But just 'cause this guy is my favorite Texas billionaire doesn't make him fit to be President. "Gummint" in my home state has almost always been run by folks who think the purpose of gummint is to create a healthy bidness climate. The result is that Texas is Mississippi with good roads. I wouldn't wish that on the rest of the nation.

It says right at the top of the Constitution what government is supposed to do: "Form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." It doesn't say anything about the bottom line. Nothing wrong with running government in a bidnesslike fashion -- that's why you should appoint some penurious s.o.b. as Secretary of the Treasury. But we need more from our government than bottom- line thinking. As that goofy guy from Baja Kennebunkport said, we need some of this vision thing.