Bill Clinton is a Big Asset

Don’t forget Nafta.

Ross Perot knew what was up.

From a Bush/Clinton/Perot debate during the 1992 campaign:

Q: Yes, I’d like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do as President to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business, and to stop unfair competition here at home from foreign countries so that we can bring jobs back to the United States.

PEROT: That’s right at the top of my agenda. We’ve shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you’ve served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who’ve got these one-way trade agreements that we’ve negotiated over the years and say, “Fellows, we’ll take the same deal we gave you.” And they’ll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we’ve got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply — you see, if it was a two-way street — just couldn’t do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.

To those of you in the audience who are business people, 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, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your 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.

So we — if the people send me to Washington the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street. One last part here — I decided i was dumb and didn’t understand it so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who’ve been around it and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?” They say, “It’d be disruptive.” I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, “well, how does it stop being disruptive?” And that is when their 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. We’ve got to cut it out.

He was being quite successful util he unexpectedly pulled out of the race. The reasons for his withdrawal were not specifically mentioned until after Clinton was elected, but PermaGov assets definitely had a hand in it.

From Wikipedia (Emphases mine):

By the summer [of 1992] Perot commanded a lead in the presidential race with thirty-nine percent of the vote.[26]

—snip—

…on July 15, Ed Rollins resigned after Perot fired advertisement specialist Hal Riney, who worked with Rollins on the Reagan campaign. Rollins would later claim that a member of the campaign accused him of being a Bush plant with ties to the CIA.[29] Amidst the chaos, Perot’s support fell to 20%.[30] The next day, Perot announced on Larry King Live that he would not seek the presidency. He explained that he did not want the House of Representatives to decide the election if the result caused the electoral college to be split. Perot eventually stated the reason was that he received threats that digitally altered photographs would be released by the Bush campaign to sabotage his daughter’s wedding.[31] Regardless of the reasons for withdrawing, his reputation was badly damaged. Many of his supporters felt betrayed and public opinion polls would subsequently show a large negative view of Perot that was absent prior to his decision to end the campaign.[32]

Further…from the NY Times:

October 26, 1992
THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: The Overview; PEROT SAYS HE QUIT IN JULY TO THWART G.O.P. ‘DIRTY TRICKS’

By RICHARD L. BERKE,
WASHINGTON, Oct. 25– At a time when Ross Perot’s candidacy once again appeared to be transforming the Presidential contest, the Texas billionaire offered a new explanation today for his decision in July to abandon the campaign. He said he had withdrawn after hearing that President Bush’s campaign was scheming to smear his daughter with a computer-altered photograph and to disrupt her wedding.

Mr. Perot offered no evidence, only quoting friends and an unidentified “top Republican.”

“I can’t prove any of it today,” he said on tonight’s CBS News program “60 Minutes.” “But it was a risk I did not have to take,” he added, “and a risk I would not take where my daughter is concerned.”

A spokesman for the President dismissed Mr. Perot’s assertions as “all loony.”

The “loony” smear. Sound familiar?

Yup.

—snip—

Mr. Perot has often spoken of threats to himself or his family and has embraced conspiracy theorists from both the far left and the far right wings of politics. [ Page A12. ]

In addition to the accusations about his daughter, Mr. Perot said in an interview with The Boston Herald that he had a videotape of a senior member of the Bush campaign, whom he did not identify, talking to a contract employee of the Central Intelligence Agency in Dallas. He did not say how he got the tape or if he knew what they were discussing. Mr. Perot accused the unidentified C.I.A. employee of being hired to tap into his computerized stock trading program to prevent him from having the money to revive his campaign.

Marlin Fitzwater, the White House spokesman, told reporters in Billings, Mont.: “It’s all nonsense. There’s nothing to it. I don’t want to attack Perot, but I don’t know where he’s getting it from. I mean, fantastic stories about his daughter and disrupting her wedding and the C.I.A. — it’s all loony.”

There’s that “loony” word again.

Hmmmm….

Mr. Perot did not say today exactly how the Republicans sought to discredit his daughter, Carolyn, and disrupt her wedding. But in an interview last week, Suzanne McGee, another of Mr. Perot’s four daughters, said her father thought Republicans would mount a campaign asserting that Carolyn was a lesbian.

“We were told that they were planning to destroy her wedding by spreading the story that she was a lesbian,” Ms. McGee said on a flight from Detroit to Lansing, Mich., for the last Presidential debate.

“It wasn’t true, but they were going to do it anyway and put the story out in the news media to try to embarrass my dad,” she added.

In his first campaign rallies in months, Mr. Perot today told supporters in New Jersey and Pittsburgh of his new explanation for departing the race.

“I found myself in a situation where I had three reports that the Republican Party intend to publish a false photograph of my daughter, who was getting married on Aug. 23,” he told a rally in Flemington, N.J., “smear her before her wedding and actually disrupt the wedding ceremony.” Rising in Polls

With roars of approval from his supporters, Mr. Perot declared that he did not want to ruin the wedding, saying, “This is one of the most important days of her life, and I love her too much to have her hurt.”

The assertions marked a surprising turn that comes as polls showed over the weekend that Mr. Perot had gained ground with voters last week in the aftermath of the Presidential debates and amid his blitz of television advertising, although he was still well behind Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush.

Mr. Perot’s accusations were all the more unusual because many analysts had speculated that he withdrew from the race initially because of news reports saying he had employed private investigators to uncover information that could embarrass Mr. Bush and his family.

In the interviews and in the appearances today, Mr. Perot described what sounded more like a shadowy underworld than a Presidential campaign.

“I couldn’t believe that anyone representing the President of the United States would stoop to these lows,” he said on “60 Minutes,” referring to a purported scheme to wiretap his office.

He said Republican plotters planned to alter a photograph of his daughter, Carolyn, using computer techniques to”put a head on another body,” and that this would be given to supermarket tabloids. He was not specific about what the photo would show.

He told The Boston Herald that the plotters were “actually going to have people in the church to disrupt her wedding.” Mr. Perot did not say what the disruption would consist of, but he took no chances when the ceremony was actually held, in August. “We had to have extraordinary precautions at the wedding,” he told “60 Minutes.”

Mr. Perot said that even after he left the race the Bush campaign cooked up a plan to install eavesdropping devices in his business office in Dallas. He said “a source” sent him “a floor plan, layout of my floor, and telephone numbers they wanted to tap.”

Mr. Perot said he turned the material over to the law-enforcement authorities, who then asked him to make a tape recording of his own voice to use as bait for a trap.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed in August that it was investigating accusations that someone had bugged Mr. Perot’s office telephone and then had offered the tapes to Mr. Bush’s campaign chairman in Texas. The Bush campaign chairman refused the tapes and notified the F.B.I., Federal officials said.

A senior law-enforcement official said today that the bureau’s Dallas office investigated Mr. Perot’s accusations but came up with no evidence of wrongdoing. Officials also confirmed that Mr. Perot had been asked to make the tape.

After he withdrew from the race, Mr. Perot said, he was scheduled to meet with the President, but when he let it be known through aides that he intended to confront Mr. Bush with his suspicions “of dirty tricks, the meeting was canceled.” Later, he did meet with James A. Baker 3d, Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, and laid out his accusations, Mr. Perot told The Herald. Lack of Denials

He suggested that the lack of direct White House denials at the time was suspicious. “I just find it fascinating,” he told the newspaper, “that neither George Bush nor Jim Baker would ever come back and say: ‘Perot, you’re crazy. We didn’t do this.’ “

The only source that Mr. Perot would identify for his accusations was Scott Barnes, a former Inglewood, Calif., police officer who for years has been accused of fabricating stories about undercover plots and dirty tricks.

Mr. Perot said in the “60 Minutes” interview that Mr. Barnes was one of those who told him of the doctored photograph. Mr. Barnes had a dress shop in Prescott, Ariz., but it is now closed. He could not be reached today for comment.

Mr. Perot said he would not have dropped out of the race if Mr. Barnes were his only source. Two “longtime friends” also talked to him “totally independently from Scott Barnes,” he said.

Mr. Perot said that among the people he told of the dirty tricks at the time was James Squires, his press secretary. Mr. Squires said in a telephone interview this evening that the night before Mr. Perot dropped out, “he gave me six or seven reasons why he was going to quit the next day — this was one he asked me to not say anything about.”

Mr. Squires said that while Mr. Perot told him of a doctored photograph, “I never did get the nature of the photograph.”

While Mr. Perot refused to identify any Republicans behind the efforts, Mr. Perot said: “This is at the top. This was run at the top. You know, everybody up there panicked in May and June when I was leading everybody in the polls. And they went crazy and they lost their good sense, and they started doing things like this.”

The Bush campaign dismissed the accusations today “With just 10 days to go before the election,” its statement said, “it is the height of irresponsibility for ’60 Minutes’ to air these unsubstantiated charges.”

Margaret Tutwiler, a ranking aide to Mr. Baker, confirmed today that after Mr. Perot dropped out he had two meetings with Mr. Baker. During one meeting, she said, he raised the general subject of “Republican dirty tricks.”

Ms. Tutwiler added: “There was no evidence presented. It was a conclusive type of statement. Baker thought it was far-fetched.”

Remember.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Always and everywhere.

Bet on it.

You still don’t believe in the Big Fix?

Go vegetate in front of your chosen mass media, and…have a nice day.

Station WTFU signing off.

AG