Already, Perot has put two issues on the agenda that he and his backers won’t let the country forget. The first is the deficit. On “Good Morning America” last week, Bill Clinton was suddenly listing “deficit reduction” as his No. 2 priority after job creation. The second Perot issue is Washington sleaze, especially those lobbyists working for foreign interests. The pressure from the Perot movement to clean up the lobbying cesspool will likely bring some reforms.
Hiring Perot himself is risky business. Lyndon Johnson used to say that it’s always preferable to have someone inside the tent peeing out than outside the tent peeing in. Perot could well be inside the tent peeing … in. This was certainly his experience at General Motors, where bringing him into the fold led to a nasty public spat. If he sees something he doesn’t like, he says it. This would be especially true since he would view the president as his inferior. The odds are high that Perot would turn into an exploding cigar, resigning in disgust amid huge publicity that harms the administration.
On the other hand, Perot has made contributions in Texas, particularly on education, without driving the governor completely crazy. And the public pressure to give him something to do could be intense. If he’s not inside the tent in some fashion, he would likely be out essentially running for president in 1996. At least if he has a government job, he couldn’t be on television all the time.
One option would be to appoint Perot to head a commission, either to get to the bottom of the POW/MIA issue (as Clinton hinted, without specifically committing to appointing Perot) or to suggest places to cut the budget. The advantage of the latter idea is that it would give the president a long list of specifics he needs, plus Perot’s salesmanship in making the country swallow the bitter medicine, Right now, Perot’s plan says cut X percent here and Y percent there, but it doesn’t explain exactly which offices would be trimmed. That’s the hard part.
The problem with assigning Perot this task is that it’s likely that many of his recommendations would not be followed, and he’d leave angry. A better idea might be to tap his management skills by giving him an agency and telling him to “fix it.” The CIA, FBI, DEA or any place where he could indulge his paranoid tendencies would obviously be foolhardy. Better to have him run the U.S. Postal Service or the General Services Administration (GSA), the huge government agency that provides everything from pencils to vast warehouses. In 1988 Perot got into a spat with both bureaucracies over contracts that would have made him even richer. But he knows their business and could no doubt make them work better. The GSA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development own thousands of buildings that Perot could convert to housing for the homeless. Right now, GSA is a poorly run agency; the federal government is actually constructing new office buildings in several cities where gleaming glass towers already sit idle.
Could Ross actually toss that Mickey Mouse salad? He says it’s time to act instead of talk. Let him fix an agency like GSA first, then go on Larry King to brag about it. Rest my case.
