Sucking 20 Years Later

Oh Ross, we apologize. That day you said would come, when we'd remember your words and hang our heads, has arrived.

The year was 1992; the presidential election cycle of exactly two decades ago. America had something pretty rare happening – a 3-way race for the White House, in which the alternate party candidate was actually making the dialogue a "trialogue," and had odds-makers wondering if he might just be the dark horse who could deny both Red and Blue teams of the win.

On the right was George Herbert Walker Bush, Dubya's dad, attempting to win a second term four years out of the shadow of Ronald Reagan. On the left was a "golden boy" candidate named William Jefferson Clinton who seemed to be channeling the muse of Kennedy, appealing to a burgeoning Gen-X voter core.

In that enigmatic middle-ground stood a demure, trophy-eared monolith with a 1950s haircut, named Ross Perot – a fantastically successful business magnate and pragmatic traditionalist, who unlike the other two, claimed he came to the contest with reluctance, but for a passionate devotion. He didn't need the Presidency – it would actually represent a pay cut to him. His was a call to duty alone. He was "drafting" himself. His country needed him.

While the Red and Blue factions bombarded the nation with buzzwords and sound-bites as usual, Perot went about campaigning in a bizarrely quaint fashion. Instead of mudslinging ads and slick marketing, Perot bought half-hour chunks on network television, and methodically presented his plan for rescuing the nation from the clutches of the Politicrats... with cue-card sized graphs and pie charts that looked hot from the toner roll of his Lexmark desktop printer. He presented the vague impression of an obsessed newscaster who'd spent the afternoon collaborating with an Office Depot copier clerk.

He often punctuated his points with homespun metaphors, like "gettin' the old jalopy back on the road," and "convincing the ducks to walk in a row again." He was as magnetic as a favorite grandpa, as entertaining as a marathon Saturday Night Live skit, and most striking of all, he was utterly sincere.

And what no doubt scared his Red and Blue opponents in private, was that in his wrinkled little southern-drawled way, he made sense. He was not a shill for a mere party philosophy – he really wanted to "fix" the country. And once done, he'd return to the private sector where the pay and the perks were better.

His basic demeanor in each debate – in which Bush and Clinton were forced to tolerate his unprecedented grassroots gravitas – was a symbolic Post-it Note reading "Tired of the bullshit yet?"

He chose as his running mate a gritty "right stuff" era Navy pilot, Vice Admiral James Stockdale – a gruff old crewcut centurion who had no desire to graduate a Toastmaster's course. In a vice-presidential debate, pitted against the Red Team's Dan Quayle and Team Blue's Al Gore, Stockdale answered their eloquent over-souling with dry, stoic grunts-on-point. His most famous retort, when asked his view of Gore's economic theories, simply burped, "They won't work." Period. Silence. Not even a lifted eyebrow to signal the moderator that he was done. Beating the five-minute buzzer by 4:59.

Satirists loved him.

It ranked as the most surreal election year America had witnessed in memory. Perot's biggest obstacle, which ultimately he could not hurdle, was his image as a maverick industrialist, a CEO, rather than a diversified statesman and diplomat. What he succeeded in doing on election night, despite having been higher in the polls leading up to it than either Bush or Clinton individually, was to divide the conservatives in sufficient numbers to give the Oval Office to Bill Clinton, who carried the night with only about 40% of the vote, and who would go on to hold a full two-term Presidency.

What makes Perot suddenly relevant twenty years later, amid the election cycle leading to 2012, are his prophetic little Kinko's pie charts.

Perot's most remembered quote, was his commentary on the then-hottest political bone in the dogfight – the North American Free Trade Agreement. Both Reds and Blues touted it as the medicine America needed to make the economy boom, and argued only on its nuance, and how to go about assimilating its supposed benefits into the system. Perot instead, spoke of a "giant sucking sound." He said that sucking sound would be the nation's job market circling the toilet.

He said we would rue the day we allowed NAFTA. It would ultimately amount to a financial bitch-slap on Americans, on a galactic scale... in oh, about... TWENTY YEARS.

Dingdingdingdingdingdingding. Good answer.

Now we know. That twenty-years has passed, like a glittery parade marching south. And unlike either Bush, Clinton, Quayle, Gore and every politico and pundit of the early 1990s, Ross Perot appears to have known exactly what he was talking about.

He'd won straw polls galore, but the media lived in denial of him. He wasn't a member of either established cadre. A "kook."

This year we again have a platoon of standard agendafied, party-line towing, well-groomed shills competing for a shot at the nation's highest office, currently occupied by an individual who was carried there on a crest of national dissatisfaction with the status quo... who has proven stale, whose policies appear to have been theory-based only. Whose message of hope has been drowned out by that terrible sucking sound that Ross Perot nailed, long long ago.

The nation is falling into the trance of tribalism. To those who've woken from the Matrix, the 2012 Presidential Election will NOT be a battle between Red and Blue ideologies.

Like Perot, the lone voice in the wilderness crying out for a revolution away from Party Agendas, in the name of loyalty to country, is again confined to the Media's Deadzone. Ron Paul, ongoing straw poll champion, is ignored, because he isn't in the country club of media approval. Satirists can't figure him out. Pundits wish he'd go away.

Instead, Mitt Romney basks in the pole position, shrouded by a mysterious "front-runner" fog, based on some imagined magnetism equally as solid. And in the wings, another Texas governor, Rick Perry, in mere hours as I write this, is about to announce his candidacy. Something he denied he'd do... but was being groomed for, undoubtably. A late-entry, he somehow has every campaign strategy and accessory in place – his mighty slogan-emblazoned jet sits waiting in the hangar. He steps forward with the other combatants somehow already knowing they are defeated.

Apollo Creed. Ron "Rocky" Paul will symbolically stand alone, his wiry muscles thin but willing – while the crowd of glass-jawed posturers will pretend for a time to draw swords, but use the move to silently finesse their way toward the exits.

2012 will be a scripted confrontation, between "chosen ones." Perry and Obama share something in common that is as surreal as the 1992 election. Both inherited budgets – Obama as President, Perry as Texas Governor – from George Bush. That means that neither can pull that trump card against the other when the mudslinging starts. Interesting, huh?

The winner of 2012 will not be the just, but the better purveyor of The Message. The Matrix. The Tribal Dance.

Twenty years hence, will we again look back with a saddened, worse-bruised brow? As we realize much too late, that once more a rough-edged man who did not mold with our comfort zone had offered to reluctantly put his nobility on hold to rescue the country with tough love? Like Perot had?

If only we'd listened?