The Businessman

Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in part because many people believed that a businessman who served as President could run the country like a business and get it back on track as only a CEO could.  Henry Ross Perot, who died last month at the age of 89, was the anti-Trump.  For one thing, Perot actually ran a successful business - two, in fact - that designed and operated data processing systems.  The earlier business, Electronic Data Systems (Perot Systems was his second), was bought by General Motors, earning Perot a seat n GM's board of directors, where he was too honest about the quality of GM's products.

Perot parlayed that honesty into his 1992 presidential campaign, in which he ran as an independent and told everyone the unpleasant truth about how the runaway spending and misadministered government programs initiated by both parties got us into a big mess and left the country ill-prepared.  In 1992, Perot's campaign rallies rivaled Nirvana concerts in terms of audience drawing power and coolness; he made fiscal responsibility combined with a social conscience fashionable, and millions responded to his message and to his wonky TV ads explaining what was wrong and what needed to be done.  (Here we are now, educate us!)  Perot's patriotism ran deep, as evidenced by his work in trying to find missing American servicemen in Vietnam and getting them home.        

Perot won 19 percent of the vote in the 1992 presidential election, the best showing fora third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, and he took as many votes from Democrat Bill Clinton (who won) as he did from Republican George H.W. Bush.  Had he run at a different time in American history - like say, at a time of anxiety after two two-term Presidents, one of each party, a condition that benefited Trump - Perot might have won, even as an independent.  And under a Perot administration, we all might have been better off.  He knew what he was doing.  RIP.