Bob Dole’s attempt to persuade Ross Perot to quit the presidential race backfired Thursday, returning the gleeful Texan to center stage to ridicule a “weird and totally inconsequential” gambit he quickly spurned.
“Do I intend to campaign to the bitter end? Yes,” Perot told a National Press Club audience, clearly relishing a moment in the spotlight after months in which his third-party candidacy has been marginalized by Dole, President Clinton and apparent public disinterest.
Perot refused to discuss his widely reported meeting Wednesday in Dallas with Dole’s campaign manager, Scott Reed, but left little doubt as to the reality of some communication, and his unabashed response.
“When people ask me to have private conversations, I honor their commitment,” said Perot, who promptly alluded to some unidentified event the day before as “weird and totally inconsequential.”
He then left no doubt that the problem-plagued Dole campaign, trailing Clinton by a wide margin, had stumbled again in a search for some galvanizing moment. “You’ll be stuck with me for a long time,” Perot said.
Publicly rebuffed by Perot, Dole seemed just plain stuck as he campaigned in the South. Visibly perturbed after the embarrassing Perot disclosure, the self-proclaimed “most optimistic man in America” turned his frustration toward voters, suggesting they haven’t paid adequate attention to the campaign and controversies involving Clinton.
“I wonder sometimes what people are thinking about, or if people are thinking at all, if they’ve really watched this administration, watched what’s happening in the White House,” the Republican nominee said in Pensacola, Fla.
“We need to wake America up. It’s (the election) 12 days away. Wake up, America. You’re about to do yourselves an injustice if you vote for Bill Clinton.”
Dole aides told reporters the candidate was angry that word of the entreaty to Perot had leaked. Lagging far behind Clinton in virtually all national opinion polls, Dole himself acknowledged his frustration.
“I know everyone gets frustrated. I even get frustrated, and I’m the most optimistic man in America,” he told a rally in a Pensacola junior college gym.
Dole’s bid to get Perot out of the race was the latest in a series of attempts to energize his campaign with a dramatic flourish.
First, he decided to leave the U.S. Senate. When that had little impact, he called for a 15 percent tax cut. Again, the modest level of interest in the campaign did not change appreciably.
The Dole camp then turned to his surprise pick of Jack Kemp for vice president, his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in San Diego and, finally, his two debates with Clinton, hoping to reach a turning point.
None seemed to have worked as desired. Neither did the covert trek to Dallas, portrayed by Clinton campaign officials as a desperate gesture.
Trying to twist the arm of the often headstrong billionaire was an act marked by typical Dole secrecy–Republican National Party Chairman Haley Barbour was among those who said he hadn’t been consulted–but was also rife with a certain irony.
Just weeks before, the Dole campaign had angered Perot and his Reform Party partisans by successfully demanding that Perot be excluded from the presidential debates.
Perot’s exclusion from the two debates, combined with his decision to accept federal matching funds–and thus not spend huge personal sums as he did effectively in 1992–has left the Texan often out of sight and out of the public’s mind.
Although he won 19 percent of the presidential vote in 1992, polls this year show Perot in single digits, somewhere between 5 percent and 8 percent. Nonetheless, Dole craves even that small percentage of voters since some of his advisers contend that it includes enough potential Dole partisans to swing several states his way.
The debate snub did not go unmentioned by Perot during his speech Thursday.
He reiterated his now well-honed trademark themes, including the need for campaign-finance reform, shrinking the national debt and federal deficit, reversing wage stagnation, and criticism of the NAFTA and GATT trade agreements.
Then, he asked rhetorically, “Do you now understand why they didn’t want me in the debates?” His brand of truth-telling, he argued, was too much for his opponents.
Campaigning in the South, Dole dodged questions about his camp’s overtures to Perot. When confronted as he stepped out of his Pensacola Beach hotel on the way to a campaign rally, he quipped: “I just saw him on the beach.”
Then, as he was about to duck into his car, Dole said, “If you see Ross Perot, tell me.”
Based on their speeches Thursday, Dole and Perot would have had much to discuss–and to agree on. Both directed an equal amount of vitriol toward Clinton and the news media.
Perot told the Washington gathering that Clinton faced “huge moral, ethical and criminal problems.” The nation is headed straight toward a “second Watergate and a constitutional crisis in 1997,” Perot said.
“Just remember where you heard it and put it in the bank,” he said.
Perot criticized Clinton and Democrats for accepting questionable campaign contributions and for inviting convicted cocaine dealer Jorge Cabrera to the White House last year after he donated $20,000 to the Democratic National Committee. The DNC says it later returned the money.
Dole offered a similar refrain about alleged Clinton misdeeds, and bashed the “liberal” press, in particular The New York Times, as insufficiently critical of Clinton.
“The country does not belong to the liberal media, it does not belong to Bill Clinton, it belongs to the people,” Dole said.
In a comment that might have blended seamlessly with Dole’s, Perot pilloried Clinton and the media, asking, “Is there no sense of decency? Is there no sense of outrage left in this country?”
The Dole camp, straining to find something positive about Perot’s moment in the media sun, heralded the Texas billionaire’s anti-Clinton assault. Dole campaign press secretary Nelson Warfield said, “The most significant part of Perot’s speech today was his stinging attack on Bill Clinton.”
Despite popular consensus that Perot’s vigorous 1992 run hurt President George Bush more than Clinton, some subsequent academic studies suggested that Perot drew from both in roughly equal measure.
During the historic 1994 congressional elections, in which Republicans gained a House majority for the first time in 40 years, two-thirds of Perot supporters voted Republican, according to surveys.
That reality prompted both parties to court the Perot vote, including its so-called “angry white male” component.
But it is now also believed that the makeup of the Perot camp has changed and tends to include a higher number of less well-educated, younger white males. Some analysts believe that this time, the Perot votes would disperse equally to Clinton and Dole were Perot not running.
For Dole, any potential source of votes is worth pursuing. But now he must hope that publicity about his overture to Perot does not energize a third-party campaign that Dole, like Clinton, had hoped to fend off through inattention.
