"Working Folks Say. . .'We're Not Interested in Your Damn

By HENRY MULLER and RICHARD WOODBURY DALLAS H. Ross Perot

Q. It seems as if you're ready to run.

A. It's fascinating. If we had been just sitting here and I said, "I'll bet we can find a guy with a bad Texas accent who can in one minute say to people on television, 'If you want to put my name on the ballot in all 50 states, I $ will run as your candidate,' " and then I'd said, "Now let's go try to get someone to take the other side of that bet," everybody would have bet you anything you wanted to, because that won't happen, and I mention this to make one point. 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 with adversarial people . . .

Q. Adversarial people like journalists?

A. Yeah, well, like the Sunday shows. Now, it's interesting that when people are rude or arrogant or condescending, the switchboard just goes nuts for three days, people signing up because it makes them angry.

My last observation, and then you can just ask me anything you want, is that I have never been around a process that is more irrelevant to the desired end result than this. The process we have for selecting a President is irrelevant to getting a good President for the people.

What we have now is mud wrestling and dirty tricks and Willie Horton, and just stuff that everybody goes into a feeding frenzy over. It encourages virtually everybody who might be a good President not to run.

Q. You're in the process of cutting down on public appearances and boning up on the issues. How is that going?

A. That's going well. I have large, talented teams doing that. Everybody in the press wants to know who's on the team. I'm saying, "I'm sorry, I can't tell you, because you'd spend all their time talking to them."

Q. What sort of people are on the team?

A. It's a cross section. For example, when I'm working on economic positions, I want to make sure I have a spectrum. I don't want just the true believers, say, on supply-side economics. I want to hear all the different views. This is the way I do things. Then, from all those different views, we will come up with what our position is. Whether we're working on a new health-care system, the economy, a new tax system, or whatever it is, I want to get everybody's views.

Q. Are you being briefed on this process daily?

A. It's more than being briefed. Did you see Saturday Night Live? On television once, I said, "My style is I have to see it, feel and taste it." And Saturday Night Live added, "And pass it through my lower intestine." But I have to at least see it, feel it and taste it. I don't like to get briefed at the end. I like to be involved with it as it's being put together, so that's where we are right now.

But the phone banks are going crazy with working folks saying, "Why are you wasting your time on this? We're not interested in your damn positions, Perot. We're interested in your principles." Isn't that fascinating?

Q. How would you summarize your principles?

A. People go to Washington to serve, not to cash in. The government should come from the people, and we should have a government that gives people an effective voice. The people feel very strongly now that they have no voice in their government.

We have a political system that's driven by getting money. Running up and down the halls of Congress all day, every day, are the organized special interests who have the money that makes it possible to buy the television time to campaign to get re-elected next year. There are no villains here. It's just something that has evolved.

Now make the Congress -- make the White House -- sensitive to the owners of the country again. That's very important to me. These are principles of mine.

We cannot -- it is morally wrong, this is a fundamental principle -- spend our children's money. To my knowledge, the President never talks about the $4 trillion debt and what we should do with it, and yet I'm supposed to have the perfect solution to it immediately.

Q. You have also said repeatedly that you favor a constitutional amendment that would require a vote of the people before Congress could raise taxes.

A. Yes.

Q. How does that help the deficit?

A. We have a $4 trillion debt. We added 10% to it just this year because it's an election year. The first thing you have to do is stop the bleeding. That is the deficit. You should not continue to build the debt, O.K.?

Now then, the second thing: our current tax system is a very ineffective, inefficient tax system basically put together by special interests over a period of many years, and it's got a thousand patches on it, all by the special interests. You've got to change the tax system, and it has to have several characteristics. One, it's got to be fair. The current tax system is not. And two, in my judgment, it should be paperless for most of the people and get rid of this giant, ineffective bureaucracy we have around the irs.

Q. When you say the tax system is unfair, to whom do you think the tax system is unfair?

A. The grossest inequity I have seen in my adult life is when they created the new tax system and had the bubble where people like myself would pay at a lower tax rate than people who had a lower income. I was publicly on record long before this came up as saying that's wrong.

Now, for me to pay a lower rate than some guy making less than me is a joke. That's wrong. When you look at the taxes I've paid in my life, I don't have to tip my hat to anybody. There are individual years where I've paid well over $100 million in taxes. And for a guy who started out with nothing, you know, I just consider that a happy event, because if you're paying that much in taxes, things are going pretty well in your life, right?

Q. Let's say you're President of the U.S. You have clear ideas about some of the things that should be done. You have 535 members of Congress down the street. And you haven't been elected either as a Republican or as a Democrat. How do you get them on board?

A. First, my Cabinet will be made up of a cross section of the best people in both parties. I will have what F.D.R. used to call "dollar-a-year men," but I won't pay them a dollar, and they'll be a cross section of both parties. If you have followed my efforts at all, you have heard me say a thousand times to the volunteers, "If you elected Solomon as President, he couldn't solve these problems, the wisest man who ever lived, and don't think I can alone. And unless you will stay in the ring with me after November, there's no point in doing this, because we'll all be failures."

Now then, if millions of people will stay in the ring with me and assert their role as owners of the country, and if, see, when we have these town-hall presentations, Congress, the Cabinet, the leaders in that particular field, it won't be me telling the people. It's not a fireside chat. We will really be explaining this to the people. Congress will be in the middle of it.

If you look for me after the election, you won't find me doing what Presidents have been doing in recent years. I will be buried night and day in meetings with the leaders of Congress. And if you ever see me get up every morning and throw rocks at Congress, just have me led away quietly, because I understand that Congress is my equal.

In my sleep I am a better consensus leader than anybody who's up there now, and if you don't think so, just talk to the guys I work with, and if you don't think so, talk to the Texas legislature on the two times I've been down there, got everything I wanted passed, et cetera, et cetera. O.K.

I will be buried with leaders. I will make them part of the process. I will be listening, listening, listening to their ideas. They will have ideas better than my ideas. In all probability, what we finally do may be their ideas. It will probably be some first-term Congressman who shouldn't have had an idea that good, but it's the best idea, and we take these ideas to the people, present them to the people. The people say let's do it, and now we have a system out of gridlock and a system that works. That's the process I'll use.

Q. So in other words, these electronic town meetings would be your way of going over the heads of Congress to put citizen pressure on Congress?

A. No, no. Who did I say would be presenting with me? Congress.

Q. How are you going to deal with an institution, the U.S. Congress, that's not structured like a corporation where you can just talk to the three or four top guys?

A. O.K. Humor me. Get out of your stereotype cliches that a guy who runs the company is, you know, an autocrat.

Q. What --

A. Just wait a minute. Wait a minute. Look at everything that has been written about me. Look at every speech I've ever made to business schools, to business leaders and what have you. It is the reverse of telling people what to do. Now, facts probably don't matter. But if facts do matter, there's a very clear record here that I get things done by building consensus, and that's what you have to do. The point is, give the people a vote.

The next rational question is, Will the people make mistakes? Sure. We all make mistakes.

Q. But the other question is, Will the people agree? There are 250 million Americans with very divergent interests, different ideas, and at some point somebody's got to cut through and make some decisions, maybe even some hard choices --

A. Well, this is Congress's job.

Q. You're not going to get 250 million people, or even 500 members of Congress, to agree.

A. You don't expect a unanimous vote. You don't expect everybody to agree. The majority rules in our country, and let's assume you built a consensus that is more than a majority. Then you do it.

Q. How do you keep special interests from dominating the town meetings, from distorting what you see as the will of the people?

A. I want to revise the system so that it is not so money hungry at election time. I want to dramatically reduce the cost of running for office so that people don't have to spend so much of their time raising money.

I would personally -- and I will be discussing this openly with the people and the Congress, and everybody will have his day -- feel that this PAC money, soft money, these giant contributions that you can still make, should be eliminated. But if we do eliminate them, then we have to have a way that people can run for office without having millions of dollars.

To run for Governor of Texas is $10 million or $15 million. To run for Senator, I don't know how many millions it is, but it's obscene. The presidential race is far, far, far more than the numbers quoted in print because of all the soft money. Republicans now boast that they have $200 million in soft money.

Q. And you're prepared to match that?

A. I'm prepared. If the people want me to run as their servant, then I will do everything I can to give them a world-class campaign. Now, please don't translate that into "Perot pledges to spend 200 million bucks." I never pledged to spend 100 million bucks.

Q. You talked a little while ago about the mud wrestling that's going on. How different a campaign will yours be? Would we see fewer speaking engagements, less traveling, or what?

A. I will have an unconventional campaign, but I cannot tell my competitors what my strategy and tactics are, which I'm sure you can understand.

Q. How do you assess the Republican and Democratic reactions to you?

A. The Democrats are rational, and the Republicans are not. The Democrats are just running their campaign. But the Republicans -- you know what the Republicans are doing. They call you reporters all day, every day.

Q. You're talking about dirty tricks?

A. Let me say this. If you are in the publishing business and you don't know what I'm talking about, well, for some reason they put you on their exclusion list.

Q. If Bill Clinton's candidacy were to fall apart, and the Democrats had no candidate and turned to you, would you accept?

A. That won't happen. No way that would happen.

Q. But if it were to happen?

+ A. It wouldn't happen. I don't think there's any chance that Governor Clinton will not be the nominee.

Q. What if there is a "Draft Perot" effort within the Democratic Party? A couple of party leaders, Willie Brown in California, for example, have already mentioned this. Would you accept that nomination?

A. I think it would be improper to even speculate, because it won't happen. It just won't happen, guys.

Q. If you recognized that having two candidates run against George Bush would elect the incumbent, would you drop out of the race?

A. We'd just have to look at all the facts. I don't want to be disruptive. I don't want to damage the process.

Q. You've been very hard on George Bush.

A. Wait a minute. Can we talk about issues? For example, he was responsible for the banks and the savings and loans, and look at what it got us. For 10 years his fingerprints were all over creating Saddam Hussein and putting billions of taxpayer-guaranteed loans in Hussein's pocket.

I promise you this: as I make mistakes, I will just say, "All right, I have made a serious mistake," and get it over with in one day. Who was in charge of antiterrorism? George Bush. Who created Noriega? George Bush. Who was in the middle of Iran-contra? George Bush. When Iran-contra came out, why didn't they just say he was in charge of antiterrorism? That's what Iran-contra was. Why didn't he just say, "Well, I blew that, right?" It's a one-day event.

As opposed to that, everybody shredded; everybody ran, ducked and hid. Everybody turned into Teflon, and who got hurt? The American people got hurt, and we're still paying for Judge ((Lawrence)) Walsh to try to figure out what happened. Wouldn't it have been simpler just to say, "I did it, and here's why I did it, and in retrospect I shouldn't have done it"?

I'm not attacking him as a person. I'm not attacking his personal life. I'm not doing all those things that he directs that his people do as really the only thing, I guess, they're able to against anybody who runs against him. And believe me, you will never hear the words come out of my mouth, "We will do whatever it takes to win." I think that is irresponsible. And anybody who thinks that uncontrolled people are out here making these day-by-day attacks, particularly on Governor Clinton, believes in the tooth fairy. Those things all come from on high. Those people all report directly into the White House.

Q. Are you saying they're doing this with Bush's consent or without it?

A. You're sophisticated. I'll let you decide. All right. Let's assume I have somebody in my organization who's doing something like that. He might do it once, and that person would be out of the organization, right? Pretty simple. Yes, it's done with his approval. It has to be. In Washington, see, nobody takes responsibility for anything.

Q. You've said in different ways to different audiences that you don't have the patience to be President. You said once, "My orientation toward results would get me into deep trouble." You've obviously thought about this and decided that you do, after all, have the temperament?

A. I think there's a different climate now. People want things fixed. They want a guy to get under the hood of the car and fix the engine. I think they're finally ready for somebody who will go in and fix things as opposed to let things deteriorate while he goes around and holds news conferences and two-day summits on various social programs and domestic issues. They want it done. Now, that's up to them.

Let's assume that by November they say, "No, we'd just rather have more smooth talk." That's fine.

Q. But you're not going to change your temperament. What you're saying is that the country now wants a temperament like yours?

A. What you see is what you get.

Q. Let's come back to a fundamental issue that is central to what you're talking about, which is these electronic town meetings. As you've sketched them out, they're going to involve the Cabinet, members of Congress . . .

A. And the leaders in the industry, like health care, who know most about it.

Q. Given the fact that it's very hard to get people to watch television for five, six hours at a go unless it's the Super Bowl, how are you going to present the issues to the American people in enough complexity so they can make a rational decision?

A. See, your assumption is that the American people like sound bites. I don't buy your assumption. They want the facts, they want details; they realize they've been sound-bitten to death, they realize they've been headlined to death, they realize they've been jerked around by inaccurate stuff that gets fed to them. They would really like to understand because, finally, they pay the bills.

Q. I've talked to a variety of political scientists, polling experts, et cetera, about your --

A. You're on the wrong end. You talked to the Establishment. If I were a pollster, I would say, "What's this? My job is to tell you what people think. I get paid 100,000 bucks every time I tell you."

Now, I love your polling guy. Let's just follow your logic all the way through. I would say that, my God, you'd better cut out general elections too, because they're certainly not scientific either. How do I even know that a cross section of America shows up to vote? My God, we have a flaw in the system. We'd better go to polling to select our candidates, right? Just follow your logic all the way down to the ridiculous end, and you come out there.

This is light-years beyond the pollster calling. We run this country now by what the pollsters say. You know that and I know that, and you know to your toes that both parties don't make a move until they take a poll. If you ever see me doing that, just have me led away, because that is so goofy, you know. It's not what's the right thing to do. Let's take a poll and then follow the wind. O.K.

The logic of all these people that you talk to just flies apart when you look at it. The town hall is 20 times better than polls in terms of knowing what people think. Polls are a reaction. The town-hall reaction is after you're informed.

Q. But the point is, the whole nature of representative democracy is that a conscientious member of Congress -- and there are some -- can say, "Yeah, the people back home, according to the polls, are against me on this issue, but I believe in my gut that it's the right issue, and I'm going to do it anyway."

A. Terrific. Terrific. I'm for that guy. I love that guy.

Q. But in the model you set up, it is basically that these Congressmen would have to be, in essence, robots to that sort of --

A. No, that's your conclusion. Did you ever hear me say that? You said that.

Q. There's been a lot of debate about how transferable a business leader's skills would be in the political government world. Your style has always been make it happen, and things have happened. Do you see a lot of frustrations, a lot of butting up against brick walls?

A. No. There are a thousand frustrations in making it happen anyway, see. My life has not been limited to the business world. For example, getting the North Vietnamese to change the treatment our POWS received was not a corporate event. That's just something that I had to start from scratch and get millions of people from this country and around the world to express anger about, and they changed the treatment, and more men survived. So can we agree that was not a ceo giving orders?

Now then, my activities on drugs and education were not a ceo giving orders. Again and again and again I've had to go build consensuses, get people to do things, and get them done, and I listen to people. I don't order people around.

Q. What's your current idea on choosing a Vice President? I mean, how are you going to go about it?

A. Just studying the issue. I'm working on it myself. I just want a person who's fully qualified. And I've said again and again, if the American people's reaction is that we ought to reverse the ticket, that's fine with me.

Q. Do you ever have any doubts about what you're doing? Do you ever wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and wonder if this is crazy?

A. I don't wake up in the middle of the night. I'm not strung out. You see, I have a very strong feeling that we all have a thermostat setting on stress.

The one time I could ever relate to stress was during the rescue of our people from Iran. We had people's lives at risk, I had my life at risk, we had the company at risk. My children could have lost a father, putting it on a very personal basis when I was in there in the prisons and what have you. When Paul and Bill and the rescue team were coming out overland, see, they'd done the impossible. They'd got out of prison. And just sitting there and waiting for them to get to the Turkish border, that was stress.

Q. What about Harry Truman's comment after he took over as President when Roosevelt died, "I felt like the sun and the moon and the stars had all fallen on my shoulders"? As you are about to embark on this almost certain race for the White House, don't you worry at some times whether you too are worthy of bearing that weight?

A. Yes. The greatest thing that would break my heart is if I got there and could not do the job for the American people, and that's the reason I've spent so much time telling them that I can't do it by myself. I know that. The thing I will hate, hate -- not dislike, hate -- is the strange life we have created for our President where he is totally out of touch with reality, and where he is fed and briefed, and I will not get in that trap. I will break out of it. And everybody says security, security. You can't really be a good, effective $ leader if you are isolated, and we have totally isolated our President from reality.

Q. Given all the Secret Service protection and all the entourage protection, how would you break out, how could you break out?

A. Just watch me. I will not live like a Third World dictator. I will not have a motor cavalcade. It has nothing to do with security. It has everything to do with the regal presidency.

I will not shut down entire road systems so that I can drive from point A to point B without having to stop at a stoplight.

Q. The entire city of New York will vote for you if you promise that.

A. The point is, if traffic is bad in New York City and I'm in New York City, I want to know that traffic is bad in New York City.

I will have to have privacy. I will not live my life, you know, 100% exposed. This business of the press following the President if he goes out to have dinner with a friend at night -- I'm going to have to work that out with the press. I'll say, "Guys, I'm just a human being. I've got to have a little private life. If anything's happening, I'll let you know. But, you know, don't follow me around, don't hound me. And in return, I'll have a lot of press conferences with you."

Q. Is your family prepared to campaign?

A. No. I don't want to involve them in the campaign. Margot will do something. She won't be a Barbie doll. You know, I don't want my family to be brutalized. And this goes back to where we started. We have a process that's irrelevant to selecting a good candidate.

Q. If this effort gets up to, say, 41, 42 states, 43, and then stops, what then?

A. That won't happen. All the volunteers have already networked. They'll swarm into those states and get it done.

Q. The official announcement is just a formality, then?

A. No, no, no. Tomorrow something could come up and everybody might say let's drop it. This is driven from the bottom up. The ((opposition's)) strategy now is to try to get the American people to drop it.

Q. Can we narrow the announcement date down to --

A. Not really, no. No, I don't have to do this. No, I could wait till August. You know, what's the hurry? If all 50 states are done, I don't even need to make an announcement. I've already said I'll do it.

Let's assume that the American people want to keep things the way they are. I hope it's apparent to you, I will be tickled to death to stay down here, look after my business, enjoy my family.

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