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

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"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.

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.

That doesn't sound wholly unbelievable, from a 2019 point of view.

>"Mentally stable" does not really capture the American electorate's impression of Perot's candidacy in 1992.

Don't mix up the American people with the Mainstream media

Are you implying he was lying or hallucinating?

Edit: genuinely curious as to why my question is being down voted.

Something about your comment makes me compare and contrast with the oddball outsider who did make it into the White House - the current occupant.

At the time there were many people who cursed Perot for splitting the two party vote, however he did get 18.9% and that is pretty incredible considering how entrenched attitudes were at the time for voting Democrat to make sure the Republican didn't win and vice-versa.

I have watched Perot's political adverts from the era and I thought he was a breath of fresh air. If I was American and of voting age at the time I like to think I would have voted for him and not succumbed to the peer pressure to vote Democrat.

Even the idea of a third party candidate was ahead of its time. Ralph Nader must have been informed by the success of Perot.

The one ad I remember mocked our government for "wasting" money studying "gas emissions" from cows. Of course, the question of agricultural methane production is quite important from the standpoint of total greenhouse gas emissions, and there has been interesting research towards reducing methane emissions while maintaining production. It's also a negligible part of the budget, like almost all scientific spending. I was 13 years old and thinking, how stupid, is this guy saying he's going to go through picking and choosing these tiny little line items in the budget based on how they sound?

From a larger perspective, it shows that even sophisticated businessmen fall victim to the usual fallacies about government spending, thinking that there's a lot more waste that can be easily trimmed than there is, that you can cut a few unpopular programs and make a reduction in taxes or balance the budget, or that a national government should be run like a household, putting off spending when revenue is low and cranking it up while it is high.

That's not a fallacy he fell victim to, that was campaigning and electioneering. It was hot on the tail of a big news expose about $600+ toilet seats and $40 bolts that the pentagon was buying. Plus America was starting to accelerate the the transformation in to a services and information based economy and we not just knew but were planning on sending manufacturing to Latin America. That waste had real resonance with workers and a lot of other folks at the time. "They're sending car manufacturing jobs to Mexico and the eggheads are studying cow farts.. (with some giant sounding number of dollars)" They still do this, you don't have to google far to find criticism over how much it cost for the Obamas to vacation in Hawaii or what the secret service spends at Mar-a-Lago.

Now there was no way Ross was going to go through the budget and pick out the crappy wasteful things, but that message had legs. Enough such that congress doesn't do a budget anymore...

Hmm? America has had nominally serious third party candidates for the presidency regularly since the emergence of today’s two major parties 150 years ago.

Heck, the GOP itself began as an ultimately successful third party challenge.

Even the idea of a third party candidate was ahead of its time.

That time being 1832? Or any other election after which a third party candidate had an influence over the outcome?

The current incumbent isn't really Republican, he was a Democrat supporter until recently, has never held elected office and ran on the Republican ticket just because he had the money to do so. He is a genuine outsider.

Doesn't this basically describe Bernie Sanders?

They were bad ideas that were ill-founded and have done far more harm than good, but he explained them with charts, so all good I guess.

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