
Ross Perot Has Died - chuckgreenman
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/09/billionaire-and-former-presidential-candidate-ross-perot-is-dead-at-89.html
======
coupdejarnac
My dad was a programmer at EDS for a short time before the Iran incident. Dad
has a great deal of respect for Perot- Perot was quite the role model and
practiced what he preached. He was also very approachable. Dad looks kindly on
the times he had short but friendly interactions with Perot on the elevator or
wherever around EDS. Dad was slated to join the Iran contract, but he decided
being a programmer was not for him(he HATED punchcards). Talking with Dad
today, one thing that isn't remembered as well is Perot's support of veterans
during the Vietnam War, which was not in vogue then.

~~~
RickJWagner
That's awesome. I started in Tech in 1990, I remember stories about Perot and
EDS. An incredible time in the business. (Also, the 'must wear a suit' era,
which I believe Perot was big on.)

------
fdavison
None of what I've read today on his passing have mentioned this interesting
story of the rescue of his employees from Iran during the revolution:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Wings_of_Eagles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Wings_of_Eagles)

A mini-series was produced about it starring Burt Lancaster

~~~
thomasjudge
I enjoyed the book, never saw the tv program, although I also just found this
counter-narrative: [https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-
xpm-1992-07-09-920302...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-
xpm-1992-07-09-9203020097-story.html)

~~~
basch
Back when the Chicago Tribune thought it was Buzzfeed, I dont think they liked
him.

"26 REASONS WHY ROSS PEROT DOESN`T DESERVE YOUR VOTE"

[https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-
xpm-1992-10-08-920401...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-
xpm-1992-10-08-9204010175-story.html)

~~~
kevmo
The Chicago Tribune is not a good newspaper.

~~~
rayiner
The Trib is a fantastic newspaper what are you talking about.

------
gdubs
Many remember Perot as the goofy rich guy who ran for president in 92, but
what many don’t know is that he funded NeXT computer - Steve Jobs’ post-Apple
venture that was later acquired by Apple and transformed computing for the
next decade. Interface Builder and the NextStep core libraries were arguably
one of the biggest catalysts of the iPhone App ecosystem. In many ways iOS
exists because of NeXT. So while it was considered by many to be a failed
company, behind the scenes its technology has continued to be influential.

Perot deserves credit for seeing the magic there, and staking a significant
chunk of change on it.

~~~
walrus01
It really glosses over and ignores the actual history of OSX by going directly
from describing NeXT, to iphone stuff. The first releases of OSX were
basically NeXT with a weird half baked apple GUI on top of it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Public_Beta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Public_Beta)

As OSX has evolved as its own product, of course it's been diverging from its
roots, but even as recently as v10.4 or v10.5 it was blindingly obvious where
it came from, when you started poking around under the hood of the OS.

~~~
bdcravens
> it was blindingly obvious where it came from

Why so many APIs in the Apple ecosystem start with NS

~~~
dlivingston
Oh man, I hadn't made that connection before but it's so obvious now

~~~
cpeterso
Firefox has its own historical code with NS- prefixes inherited from Netscape.
The joke now is that NS standards for "namespace". :)

------
jason_slack
I was in high school when Perot ran for President and I was a huge fan. I
remember liking how he wasn’t a politician and therefor looked at the problems
our country had from a different point of view.

This was the first time I had ever watched political debates; because I wanted
to hear him speak. He was so different.

I also was a huge Apple and then Next fan at that time too. I sent him an
email asking if he could help me get a Next computer :-)

His books are good reads if you ever get the chance.

RIP.

~~~
canada_dry
> he wasn’t a politician and therefor looked at the problems our country had
> from a different point of view.

This is what many had desired when they propelled the current 'billionaire'
non-politican to President.

Comparing Ross Perot to Trump is like comparing a Neuroscientist to a Snake-
Oil Salesman though.

~~~
brighter2morrow
Funny enough, after Ross Perot the reform party's next presidential nominee
was Donald Trump, who ran on a Perot-esque platform and was the first major
presidential nominee to support gay marriage

~~~
saxonww
He was briefly involved, but the party nomination went to Pat Buchanan.

------
sambeau
The fascinating bromance between Steve Jobs and Ross Perot

[https://www.cake.co/conversations/DwwvjtB/the-fascinating-
br...](https://www.cake.co/conversations/DwwvjtB/the-fascinating-bromance-
between-steve-jobs-and-ross-perot)

is a fun read.

~~~
neonate
That article is a lot of fun and so is this one that it linked to:

[https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/27/business/the-irritant-
the...](https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/27/business/the-irritant-they-call-
perot.html)

[http://archive.is/q5o3b](http://archive.is/q5o3b)

I had no idea he was that interesting!

------
drfuchs
I chanced to be next to him in line for the buffet at the big NeXT unveiling
event at SF’s Davies Hall and chatted briefly with him. Nobody seemed to be
aware of who / what he was at the time. I wonder how many zillionaire
investors are semi-anonymous these days.

~~~
peter303
I was there too but only saw Woz and some of the original Mac team. Started
late as was Steves habit in the early years (and probably flakey computers
too). The essence of the demo was multimedia capabilities- uncommon in that
era. I was Stanford faculty that time. The computer was aimed ar education,
but I did not why it was so much better than others. An OS mostly OOP ground
up was nifty.

------
SubiculumCode
I believe I was around 18 when I heard of Ross Perot. At the time I had been
impressed by the charts and no-nonsense approach, although now I realize I
could not have judged their content with any actual knowledge. As I know a lot
more about the world now, about debt, fiat currencies, and inflation, etc, and
how charts can be constructed to not represent reality but one's agenda,
beliefs, or misconceptions, I wonder now the extent to which Ross Perot's
charts and message were insightful, or merely propagated myths and value-
choices. Were his charts deficit hawk debt clocks and scare tactics, or were
there real insights that reflected reality? I do not remember now because I
did not understand them then. Anyone on HN have an opinion?

~~~
chiph
Here's his second infomercial. Complete with flip charts.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPIVI0CbCmg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPIVI0CbCmg)

Pretty much every topic he brings up is still relevant today.

------
WheelsAtLarge
I remember his run in 92. He got branded as out of touch and cooky by the
press with the help of the political parties. It didn't help that he quit the
race and gave some strange reason and then jumped back in. He even made light
of it by picking Patsy Cline's "Crazy" as his theme song.

He seemed like a very good man that stuck by his beliefs. Peace be with him.

------
secfirstmd
If you are looking for a contrast with a typical tech bro modern day CEO
leadership I highly recommend the book "On wings of Eagles." It describes Ross
Perots efforts to gather a mix of staff and hired guns to go into Iran and
break some of his staff out of prison during the Iranian Revolution. They
actually succeeded. Partly crazy, partly courageous...only in America!

~~~
baud147258
I remember reading that book. In the end, I don't think they had to break
people out of prison, but they still successfully extracted his staff from
Iran

~~~
toomuchtodo
I think I'll add, "Are you willing and able to extract me from a country I'm
located in (in the course of our work) while a revolution is actively in
progress?" to my list of interview questions.

~~~
gowld
Are you ready to have your mind blown?

Read this article from 20 years ago:

[https://www.wired.com/1999/03/bezos-3/](https://www.wired.com/1999/03/bezos-3/)

Jeff Bezos:

"At a certain point I was sort of a professional dater," he explains about his
years in New York. His systematic approach to the quest for a permanent
relationship was to develop what he labeled "women flow," a play on the "deal
flow" [...] "The number-one criterion was that I wanted a woman who could get
me out of a Third World prison," he says.

"What I really wanted was someone resourceful. [...] ' If I tell somebody I'm
looking for a woman who can get me out of a Third World prison, they start
thinking Ross Perot - Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

~~~
toomuchtodo
This is excellent criteria for finding a partner.

------
ChowWi
I always liked the guy. He lived not far from me. Back in the day in an old
job I did a service call at his home. Never got to meet him though. He seemed
to be a decent, forward thinking gent.

------
OBLIQUE_PILLAR
Ross Perot advocated for and greatly influenced the eventual passing of
draconian drug laws in Texas.

[http://www.issues2000.org/Celeb/Ross_Perot_Drugs.htm](http://www.issues2000.org/Celeb/Ross_Perot_Drugs.htm)

~~~
Aloha
Not everyone can be right about everything I'd note.

He was a man who made a tremendous influence, mostly good, some bad.

------
clausok
Here's a navy seal telling a story about Perot helping him figure out what was
wrong with his son -- turned out to be an incredibly rare genetic disorder.

[https://youtu.be/snMzYfhXScQ?t=5065](https://youtu.be/snMzYfhXScQ?t=5065)

------
viburnum
IIRC he was the only CEO to end equal benefits to gay and lesbian employees
(Perot Systems started when he stepped away and ended it when he came back).

~~~
mieseratte
For the curious:

> [https://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/10/us/perot-ends-benefits-
> fo...](https://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/10/us/perot-ends-benefits-for-
> partners-of-newly-hired-gay-workers.html)

> In an interview, Mr. Perot, chairman of Perot Systems, said his decision
> only reflected his fear that heterosexuals would falsely claim committed
> relationships to win these benefits.

Would be interesting to hear if he has other known slights against LGBT or if
he truly hates loopholes.

------
melling
Remember his famous “Giant Sucking Sound” comment?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound)

~~~
influx
I'd say he was right:

"We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're
paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory
South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health
care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no
environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't
care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound
going south. ... when [Mexico's] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six
dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's
leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these
kinds of deals.[1]"

Perot ultimately lost the election, and the winner, Bill Clinton, supported
NAFTA, which went into effect on January 1, 1994.

~~~
cycrutchfield
If you can build a car for cheaper elsewhere, why wouldn't you? If your goal
is to keep people gainfully employed, well how about working on improving
their skills so that a laborer in a developing country isn't more productive
than they are?

~~~
melling
The workers in the cheaper country don’t need to be as productive.

If you’re paying them 5x less in total compensation, and they’re half as
productive, you’re still better off with the cheaper labor.

No healthcare, no pensions, no environmental laws will save a company lots of
money.

------
diafygi
If you're ever in Dallas, TX, the Perot museum is one of the best children's
science museums in the world. Highly recommended for both kids and adults.

~~~
efa
Was about to post that. Our family always visits the museum when we are in
Dallas. Amazing place.

------
MaconBacon
It may not have been preventable, but he was absolutely correct on NAFTA.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It may not have been preventable, but he was absolutely correct on NAFTA.

He was wrong on NAFTA, pushing the nationalist/mercantilist line that it would
divert gains from the US to Mexico when the actual problem was that (as is
generally the case for neoliberal “free” trade) that it drove gains to the
capitalist class in both the US and Mexico (and internationally, as capital is
largely globalized) to the relative disadvantage of the working classes on
both sides of the border.

Bill Clinton was largely _rhetorically_ correct on NAFTA, at least in outline
(noting that it would be an aggregate boon but would require additional work
to avoid adverse impacts on workers), but while he did impose a labor side
agreement on NAFTA it was insufficient to change the basic problems.

~~~
newfriend
So companies moved jobs away from the US to the detriment of American workers?
How is he wrong then? That's exactly what he said would happen.

The US would have been much better off with Perot as president. Both Bush and
Clinton supported NAFTA, and Clinton ushered China into the WTO.

~~~
dragonwriter
> So companies moved jobs away from the US to the detriment of American
> workers?

No, the US experienced strong economic growth (stronger than it would have
without NAFTA) and likewise strong job growth (maybe stronger than it would
have been without NAFTA, that's less clear), but less job (or at least wage)
growth than would have been expected with similar economic growth without
NAFTA. Insofar as there was a “sucking sound”, it wasn't of jobs or wealth
being sucked to Mexico from the US, it was of relative economic position being
pulled to capital from labor in both the US and Mexico (also Canada, FWIW.)

> The US would have been much better off with Perot as president.

Not, from any evidence, based on first-order policy impacts from the
Administration. Perhaps based on _missing_ the impacts on the partisan
alignment from the pinnacle of neoliberal consensus and the subsequent
rightward surge of the Republican Party as it sought to distinguish itself
from the Clintonian neoliberalism in the Democratic Party that was virtually
identical (but for comparatively small differences on some culture war issues,
but even there Clinton was mostly a rightward divergence for the Democrats) to
the pre-Clinton Republican position, sure. Maybe bases on the partisan
realignment that would have resulted from the Perot faction displacing one of
the major parties, sure.

Certainly based on Perot not having strong-but-failed bids in 1992 and then
against with his Reform Party in 1996 which, by qualifying for matching funds,
brought a number of opportunists to seek the 2000 Reform Party nomination,
including David Duke and Donald Trump, the latter of which cited the risk of
association with the former as a reason for dropping out, but courted the same
White Nationalist constituency when he ran again, this time for a major party
nomination, after a decade and a half of retooling his political image.

> Both Bush and Clinton supported NAFTA

On trade policy, Bush, Clinton, and Perot all favored the capitalist class.

Bush did so fairly nakedly, and chose policies well-supported by modern
economics given that goal.

Perot also did so fairly nakedly, but work mercantilist policies th t both
theory and evidence had shown were suboptimal for centuries.

Clinton was like Bush, but with some at least rhetorical recognition that
supporting the capitalist class in ways which produced aggregate growth could
be counterproductive for the larger working class and that at least modest
active interventions were necessary to assure that aggregate growth resulted
in general benefit.

If one agreed with his ideological focus, Bush was the least wrong on policy.
Clinton was, at least rhetorically, the least wrong on what was necessary for
durable broad progress, though in practical first-order policy terms probably
not different enough from Bush to make much difference in outcomes, as his
mitigation measures were far too modest. Perot was the most wrong.

------
ChrisArchitect
The NeXT thing is neat. Also of course he made it into the Simpsons.

"Go ahead, throw your vote away!"

------
protomyth
You can call him "goofy", but he was anything but. I got to watch him give a
speech in Fargo during the 92 campaign and it was amazing. At the time, I got
into the habit of reading each candidates "book" they put out during the
election. His was short, to the point, and very specific on what needed
fixing. He was a serious man that ran into the establishment and got hammered.

~~~
defen
Didn't he also "disappear" (from the public eye) during a crucial point in the
campaign? My memory of this is hazy as I was only 12 at the time, but I recall
my father being interested in his candidacy, but then around July or August he
withdrew from the campaign. Then re-entered in September or October, so he
came across as "flaky".

~~~
cobbzilla
He dropped out of the race to get away from bad press, the establishment
players kinda forced him out with dirt-digging.

I think he thought it would help, but when he re-entered he was worse off.

I also remember him doing well in the debates, but his VP pick, Admiral
Stockdale, badly flubbed the VP debate.

~~~
JasonFruit
For a long time after that I only remembered Admiral Stockdale as the guy who
had his hearing aid shut off during the debate. I didn't realize his history —
he was a real intellectual, with a love of Stoic philosophy, but he determined
on the active life of a Naval Aviator. He ejected over North Vietnam and was
captured and subjected to torture. To avoid being used for propaganda, he
disfigured himself by cutting his scalp with a razor and beating his face with
a chair. When he gained information that could be used to reveal others'
attempts to subvert the North Vietnamese, he slit his wrists to avoid being
tortured into a confession. He conducted himself heroically in a war that was
anything but, and earned the respect of his fellow-prisoners and his captors,
and he gives credit to the philosophy of Epictetus, especially as contained in
his _Enchiridion_.

(And to be fair to Stockdale, he only was informed of the debate one week in
advance. He was not a skilled debater, though, to be sure.)

~~~
cobbzilla
Me too. At the time, the SNL parody was how I remember it. Only later did I
learn what an amazing hero, intellectual and person Stockdale was.

Looking back, I guess the buck stops with Perot, he should certainly have
given his VP more advance notice, and maybe some coaching in public speaking,
TV, PR.

------
FpUser
I might be naive but I do admire what he did to save his employees held
hostage in Iran.

------
systematical
Country would be in a better place if he had won in 92.

------
RickJWagner
I like Ross Perot, enough to have voted for him in '92.

A few favorites:

\- He used his own money to finance rescue missions for EDS employees caught
overseas in unfriendly situations.

\- He was sort of a cartoon-ish character,short of stature and with over-sized
ears. In one of his presidential debates I remember him making the comment
"I'm all ears!", cracking himself up with the rest of us.

RIP, Mr. Perot

------
meerita
Today also former ex-president of Argentina, Fernando de la Rúa died. He was
the president that was part of an opposition strike and derived into the big
crisis in Argentina in 2001.

~~~
Kye
Can you expand on this a bit? The connection to Ross Perot isn't clear to
someone not well-versed in the history.

------
grayed-down
I liked Ross Perot and he would have been a terrific president but damn him
for not at least trying to primary Bush and allowing the Clintons into the
White House.

------
travisl12
"Can I finish...?"

------
markhahn
independents were always weird, but at least not stupid dicks like you know
who.

~~~
brighter2morrow
Heck yeah I know who ;)

------
lucas_membrane
He did some good things. He was brave enough to recommend that high school
athletes (ie football players) in Texas could not play unless they met some
minimal standards of participation in academics.

OTOH, his business career is not atypical. The deal about starting EDS with
$1,000 may or may not be true. He was a successful salesperson for IBM. He
sold to the insurance companies in Dallas, particularly Southwestern Life,
which he talked into buying a huge 70xx (2nd generation) mainframe computer.
Supposedly, IBM then had a maximum commission that a salesperson could earn in
a year, so he was looking at a large part of a year with no additional income.
Coincidentally, Southwestern Life, having acquired an IBM computer very much
larger than it could use productively, had around 2 shifts per day that it
could easily be persuaded to lease to Perot's $1,000 new company, EDS. How did
Perot get customers? He had an associate who was very close to VP-then-
president LBJ, and there was this thing called Medicare that LBJ was starting
up, and Perot's new little $1,000 company got the contract to process Medicare
claims! So, the man who ran against government had been made a huge success by
government money.

The government really was a big friend to Perot. The government of Texas built
a highway north out of Ft Worth. Perot built an airport out there, but not
near the highway, because that land was too expensive. Then he persuaded the
great State of Texas to move the highway to serve his airport. The Treasury
department started printing money nearby, flying it to Federal Reserve banks
through his airport. And Perot systems, the company he started after he exited
EDS, early on obtained a very large contract to automate the US Post Office,
with IBM System/38 minicomputers everywhere.

As an employer, he did some things that are still a little controversial. New
tech employees signed contracts, and if they quit too soon thereafter (one or
two years, IIRC), they owed EDS $10,000 for training (this was money 40 years
ago). EDS also used mandatory overtime, (often six and sometimes 7-day weeks
during crunch time), with armed guards at the door monitoring bathroom breaks.

A couple of things he said during the 1992 campaign were also a bit fishy.
David Frost quoted Peter Lesser directly to Perot, “Ross Perot is a good
person, and he’d make a great king. But I think he’d be a bad president.”
Perot said he had never heard of Peter Lesser, whom he had met and had
discussions with, and who had run for both district attorney and mayor of
Dallas in the preceding few years. As a CEO who does not know who ran for
mayor in the city in which his business is headquartered, he must have been
pre-channeling Trump one way or the other, as he likely was with his bogus
claim during the campaign about a Black Panther assassination plot against
himself broken up by his dog.

------
davidw
> ran into the establishment

What he ran into was the inevitable math of a first past the post electoral
system.

You want third parties, you need ranked choice voting or something similar.

Even if you're fine with the main parties, RCV is probably better in terms of
electing who most people want.

You could argue that Bush senior might have won with it if the Perot voters
ranked 1) Perot 2) Bush. Bush junior might have lost had the Nader voters
ranked Gore second. Similar question marks hang over the election of Trump
with Jill Stein and Gary Johnson and the extremely thin margin of victory in
the electoral college.

~~~
espeed
> You want third parties, you need ranked choice voting or something similar.

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem : "When voters have three or more distinct
alternatives (options), no ranked voting electoral system can convert the
ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and
transitive) ranking while also meeting a specified set of criteria:
unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of
irrelevant alternatives" [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem)

~~~
tunesmith
Arrow's is one of those theorems that is useful for its own purposes, but
completely abused in a pop culture sense. All it proves is that you can't
simultaneously meet _those_ particular criteria, but it doesn't establish that
those criteria are required in any sense. The IIA criteria is especially
problematic.

A lot of vote arguments comes down to a lack of consensus on what we're even
trying to solve for. For instance, say that you have a two-candidate race.
50.1% pick A, but their support is lukewarm. 49.9% pick B, but they're
extremely passionate. Who should win? We can't really even get a consensus
agreement on that question. I think that when it comes to American democracy
and one-person-one-vote, the answer should be A, but plenty of others disagree
with me.

As for the Perot scenario, you'd need _both_ some form of ranked choice voting
(not necessarily IRV), _and_ the elimination of the electoral college. Having
RCV with an electoral college doesn't help because if you split the EC, the
election still goes to the House.

~~~
slowmovintarget
> but they're extremely passionate. Who should win?

Being angry, even in a constructive fashion, shouldn't merit extra
consideration. A vote is a signal of magnitude 1. Anything else means a person
who is angrier gets more consideration. Now we have a market incentivizing
anger, which is not how things are supposed to work.

My opinion: lack of consensus on that is caused by lack of critical thinking.

~~~
tunesmith
I agree that moving away from one-person-one-vote creates a market that
incentivizes passion, whether angry or not. Even false passion. The people
that disagree tend to talk about "greater social utility". I just don't think
there's a way to reliably measure degree of passion without falling into self-
worth questions. Like, someone wise might want to avoid confrontation, someone
idiotic might have a trumped-up sense of self-importance. (No pun intended
honestly.) One-person-one-vote is the best way we've come up with to avoid
that, treating every voter as having equal worth.

------
uses
What a quaint time when the oddball outsider candidate was a mentally stable
human being calmly explaining ideas in a way anybody could understand.

~~~
twoodfin
"Mentally stable" does not really capture the American electorate's impression
of Perot's candidacy in 1992. He was significantly damaged by his choice to
drop out for a few weeks in the middle of the summer—while leading in the
polls!—blaming shadowy Republican operatives for threatening his daughter's
wedding.

~~~
jandrese
IIRC the news outlets at the time weren't painting an especially flattering
picture of him either. I have a vague memory of stories where the implication
was that he was a nutjob with no chance of winning. My local newspaper was
pretty conservative leaning though.

------
codesushi42
Unfortunately the media establishment discredited Ross Perot by painting him
as "nutty" and focusing on his mannerisms, rather than what he was saying.
Seeing Bush's and Clinton's smirks during the debates are embarrassing, and
did nothing but baselessly discredit the man and his ideas.

The media did the same to Ron Paul by framing him as a loon and someone to
laugh at.

This same strategy by the mainstream media backfired miserably, and quite
hilariously with the unfortunate election of Trump.

~~~
shitgoose
why "unfortunate"? maybe it is about time the fourth pillar finally gets what
it deserves.

~~~
zimpenfish
> why "unfortunate"?

I mean, the kids in cages might find it unfortunate. The farmers being hurt by
tariff fights are also finding it somewhat unfortunate. I'm pretty sure the
LGBTQ community, too.

(I could go on - there's a long list of groups this POTUS is hurting.)

~~~
shitgoose
i hate doing that, so i will be brief. \--- cages - started with Obama.
farmers are hurt, other businesses benefit from production returning from
China. to early to tell. LGBT - news to me. btw, you forgot to mention that he
hates Jews too. sort of. \--- peace

------
thrax
Really glad he's dead. He was just another cheerleader for the unfettered
greed and capitalism that is destroying the Earth. Good Riddance!

------
5555624
Perot's Presidential candidacy is a good example of why we need the Electoral
College and cannot simply go with the "winner" of the popular vote. Clinton
had 370 Electoral College votes, Bush had 168, and Perot had 0. Not only did
Clinton win easily, he had a majority of ALL the Electoral College votes.

In the popular vote, it was 44,909,889 for Clinton, 39,104,545 for Bush, and
19,743,821 for Perot. While Clinton still had the majority, more than half the
votes cast for President were not for him -- in other words, the majority of
voters did not want Clinton to be elected President.

Some sort of system which uses "rounds" to narrow the field down to two
candidates could work; but, it's hard enough to get people to vote once, much
less several times.

~~~
jakamau
I feel a bit like a broken record on this, but the topic deserves discussion.

Electoral college is a valuable part of US elections but gerrymandering and
winner-take-all states destroy the institutions usefulness.

Alternative:

1\. End "winner-take-all" allocations of electoral votes

2\. Any party that gains the minimum population/electoral vote (Wyoming puts
that at ~200k) in any state is guaranteed at least one electoral vote in that
state

3\. All remaining electoral votes are allocated proportionally based on
general election votes

4\. If no majority winner exists, the party with the least number of electoral
votes casts their vote to other party/ies and this repeats until a winner
obtains 270. If a rather obstinate third party refuses to proxy their votes,
those votes are dropped when calculating majority.

This should remove the spoiler effect, function within the current voting
system, and off-set any perceived difficulty in rank voting to the actual
parties. It would also provide a strong leverage point for third parties to
have a say in government policies which is probably why it would never be
adopted willingly.

~~~
rtkwe
> 4\. If no majority winner exists, the party with the least number of
> electoral votes casts their vote to other party/ies and this repeats until a
> winner obtains 270. If a rather obstinate third party refuses to proxy their
> votes, those votes are dropped when calculating majority.

Why put this in the hands of the lowest vote getter when we can just ask the
voters directly with ranked choice voting?

------
purplezooey
Lots of people on here probably don't even remember the presidential bid, or
maybe saw it in a textbook. Strange days.

------
mdanger007
RIP, Ross Perot. Inventor of the iPhone.

------
mberning
Ross Perot was way ahead of his time. We are finally getting an idea of how
terrible some of these deals have been.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/perot-
in-1992-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/perot-
in-1992-warned-nafta-would-create-giant-sucking-
sound/2019/07/09/1f2a84e9-a56c-4487-9c43-892ab1b0c782_video.html?utm_term=.4e1d05e84d82)

~~~
sequoia
This debate footage is so remarkable to watch in 2019, for several reasons. 1:
They allowed a third party candidate in a general debate 2: The candidate is
able to take breaths & even pause without someone cutting jumping in, allowing
him to make an complete point 3: No one is talking over him while he talks.

Sure the candidates are tougher to manage in 2019 (especially after Trump
changed the game in '16), but the debate moderation we've seen so far is truly
pathetic, and I blame the moderators for robbing voters of the more meaningful
discourse that _might_ be possible if moderators did their jobs by actually
enforcing time limits & forbidding interruptions (by cutting mics).

~~~
refurb
Ross Perot was a _very significant_ third party candidate, which makes his
appearance on the debates much more understandable.

Ross got 19% of the popular vote in '92, which was just shy of half of what
Clinton and Bush got. Pretty remarkable showing honestly. Most 3rd party
candidates never get more than a few percent.

~~~
mikeash
They’d allow a third party candidate now if they did as well. To qualify, a
third party candidate need to poll at 15% or above and be on enough state
ballots to have at least a possibility of winning. Nobody has even come close
to that since Perot.

~~~
Nuzzerino
Gary Johnson reached 12% in August 2016. Clinton started running ads against
Johnson around this time as well, to prevent him from getting to the 15% mark.
Then the Aleppo gaffe happened in September, which effectively killed his
remaining chances.

