USA TODAY: In many ways, the effort itself is extraordinary. Since running twice for the presidency — his 19% showing in 1992, despite temporarily dropping out of the race, was the strongest third-party candidacy since Theodore Roosevelt’s a century ago — Perot has gradually receded from the public square. His rare interviews have sidestepped both policy and politics…
“He was clear, concise and compelling,” [David Walker, the former U.S. comptroller general ] recalls. “We haven’t had that in a long time, and we’ve got to have that in 2013.”
Walker and other fiscal watchdogs credit Perot’s 1992 campaign with putting the issue of government deficits and debt on the political map. To hear them tell it, his on-again, off-again campaign — relaunched on Oct. 1 of that year — helped produce a 1993 deficit-reduction agreement, the 1994 “Republican Revolution” that transformed Congress, and four years of budget surpluses… (more)
