Remember good ole Ross Perot? He seemed to be doing fine in the polls, then just up and quit. Of course, he returned later.
What made him quit like that? Someone told me he was afraid of doctored photos of his daughter, but that sounded silly.
He claimed that the Bush people were going to somehow sabotage his daughter’s wedding. My opinion is that he was sick and tired of the day to day bullshit of a major politcal campaign.
Haj
He’s a loony.
Cite?
When he realized that he couldn’t simply buy the presidency (the way he had bought the contracts that had let him build up EDS), he quit as a publicity ploy, tried to get back in on the sympathy vote with his cock-and-bull story about wedding sabotage.
(He tried something similar with General Motors, claiming that he was going to “rescue” it when he sold them EDS. When he found that he did not have the dictatorial powers of sole ownership/founder that he had had at EDS, he made rumbling noises that he would simply buy GM (leveraged, not direct) and when it became clear that he could not, he took his marbles and went home.)
As to a citation for his looniness: I would simply present all his wild-ass stories about plots and Vietnamese/Black Panther agents on the lawn and any number of other suggestions of weirdness.
I’ve read–and I can go dig up support for it, if you like–that Perot entered the race in the first place out of longstanding animosity for George Bush. Originally, his aim wasn’t to win himself, but simply to prevent Bush from doing so by siphoning off his constituency. So when he looked to be accomplishing that goal, he quit. Then, the theory goes, his ego got the better of him; he decided he actually wanted to be president–he was leading in some polls at the time he withdrew–and got back in, albeit too late.
I remember this being plausible when I read it; certainly it doesn’t seem particularly farfetched. If anyone can offer evidence to the contrary, I’d be open to it, but this has been–as far as I can recall–the prevailing explanation in mainstream political science literature.
I have read accounts that the Clinton people persuaded him to return to the race. Supposedly there are a lot of records of calls between the two campaigns prior to his returning to the race. If I remember correctly, Perot got annoyed by the press giving him grief over saying “you people” when he was addressing a group of blacks. He meant nothing by it, of course, but in his plain and simple way of speaking he said something that the race baiters could grab ahold of. As for the Clinton connection, it sounds dubious to me, though stranger things have happened. I can certainly understand that the Clintons were most anxious to have him return to the race. How else could someone win with something like less than 43% of the vote?
So were the doctored wedding photos false?