Ross Perot: "He's back!"

Ross Perot Has Struck Again: http://perotcharts.com/

I received an email from my former colleague, David Clemm, who ran Harris Interactive with me for many years. The title of his email was: “He’s back,” and he included an article by David Broder of the Washington Post about Ross Perot and the new Web Site – shown above – created by Perot about the spending trends in America. As he did in 1992, Perot has created a world of charts that portray an America headed toward a complete fiscal disaster. No one can do this better than Ross Perot, although the charts do not include the remarkable humor and intelligence with which he presented them to America in 1992.

Like most charts, these do not entirely speak for themselves, except in so far as the display a country whose own leaders are taking it down the road to fiscal oblivion. The trends in these charts are not alone the product of George Bush and his Administration, as convenient as it would be to blame it all on them. Most of them, indeed, are the product of the office holders in both of the parties making decisions that put their own personal short term political gains ahead of the welfare of our children and grandchildren – over and over again.

The real question, of course, is why? Why would men and women who proclaim the virtue of their superior morality and their supposed love of country create trends like those displayed in Perot’s charts? That is the question that I have struggled with for more than two decades – as has Ross Perot and many, many other good citizens. The charts demonstrate things that are fundamentally disturbing about our democratic political system. They make us question the viability of our future as a rich and prosperous country, and certainly the future we hope to preserve for our children.

David Clemm and I spent a substantial amount of time and money together in the 1990’s, along with many other people, attempting to force changes that would alter the destiny forecasted in these charts. With Perot leading the way, those efforts persuaded a very, very reluctant Congress and the Clinton Administration to reach an accord that balanced the budget for the first time in decades. They did not do this out of the goodness of their heart on the rightness of our cause. They did it only because they feared Perot. They feared that he would create a new force in American politics that would undermine their control over the offices they so cherished. They did it to take him out of the picture – for their own political security.

However, as David Clemm said in his email, he’s back. He is back because the problem that motivated him, and so many other people, is back. We are engaged in a dramatic Presidential contest where the issues contained in Perot’s charts are once again being conveniently ignored by both Presidential candidates and by everyone else in Washington, D.C. Perot has given us, as before, the “facts.” Both of the Presidential candidates are repeatedly telling the American people once again "all of the wonderful things they plan to spend our tax money to do for us," without confronting the reality that we are rapidly running out of money to do anything more than simply pay for entitlements.

I cannot personally do much, but I do know how to interpret the meaning of many of these numbers. I plan to use “Perot’s facts”, really the “facts” created by our “benevolent” political leaders, to ask the question “why” in the months ahead, and the answers are not likely to please Democrats who want to blame all of it on George Bush, or on Republicans who like to talk about “ the tax and spend Democrats.”

We all live in the world of the Internet today. We have a way – it’s called the forward button -- to get these “facts” to nearly every person in America – simply by pushing forward to your family, friends, colleagues and associates. Knowing the facts may not change them, but not knowing them will certainly make them prophecies of consequences we would not wish on our children and grand children. One hour with Perot's Charts is more enlightening than all of the speeches by all of the candidates to date in this Presidential election.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black
June 15, 2008
Perot Returns, Charts and All
By David Broder
WASHINGTON -- Sixteen years after he shook up American politics by launching an impromptu campaign for president, Ross Perot is about to dip a toe back into the public debates. And, yes, he's bringing his charts with him to make his point.
Beginning Sunday, people who go to http://www.perotcharts.com/ will find the Dallas billionaire waiting to challenge them on one of his favorite subjects -- the "ruin" he says America is courting with its spendthrift ways.
"We are right at the edge of the cliff," the voice with the unmistakable Texas twang informed me, when I called him the other day to find out about this latest venture. "We can't go on spending money we don't have."
That is not a new theme for Perot. It was his core message when he did his on-again, off-again, then back-on-again race against George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992. He led the field in the early months and, even after the confusing signals sent by his dropping out and coming back, won more than 19.7 million votes -- almost 20 percent of the total.
His real triumph, however, was a policy victory. With simple charts that he designed and displayed on prime-time television "infomercials," he managed to convey to millions of voters the stark reality of what the record deficits of the 1980s really meant.
It may well have been the first and only time that the abstraction of an out-of-kilter budget was communicated outside the boardroom or the economics classroom. People got it. A Washington Post poll taken in October 1992, at the height of Perot's public information campaign, found that 63 percent of those surveyed said they worried a great deal that the federal budget deficit would grow, and another 17 percent said it worried them a good amount.
The newly elected Clinton took note, and, prompted by Robert Rubin and other economists, abandoned his campaign promise of middle-class tax cuts and instead made his priority cutting the budget deficit. Within a few years, we had a brief and blessed run of balanced budgets.
But with the current president, deficits have returned with a vengeance -- and no one seems to care. Current polls show that less than 1 percent of the voters call the budget deficit one of the major problems facing the country.
Part of the reason is that politicians of both parties are laboring to disguise the reality from public view. Both President Bush and the Democratic Congress this year have issued budgets that claim to achieve balance in 2012 -- just four years from now.
But those budgets are based on blue-sky assumptions that have no grounding in the real world. When I asked Perot what he made of them, he replied, "It's an election year. What would you expect them to say?"
In recent weeks, when I have found myself in conversations with David Walker and other economists who know how grim the long-term budget picture really is, I have mused aloud, "We need Ross Perot back." Turns out, he was quietly preparing his return. He took some of the basic work done by Walker and others, and had professionals turn it into 35 very clear charts and link them on a Web site with an equally simple narration.
Sadly, Perot hired a professional announcer, rather than reading the text in his own distinctive Texas way, but he told me he's willing to substitute himself -- which would make it a lot less pedantic and a lot livelier. With a personal investment of some $300,000, Perot has built a real teaching tool.
Perot is not offering any solutions. But he is clearly pointing to what he says are the culprits, the big entitlements -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. As the narrator puts it with the first of the charts: "The United States faces large and growing budget deficits mostly due to an aging population and rising health care costs. Unless we solve the problems caused by entitlement spending, there will be little money left to do anything else in the future. Over time, our standard of living, our national security, our standing in the world and the value of our currency could all be threatened. The sooner we confront these issues, the better."
So far, John McCain and Barack Obama are not doing that. Perot, now almost 78, says he has no desire to get back into politics. But he's doing a service by unleashing his favorite weapon: those charts.
mailto:%20davidbroder@washpost.com