At a red light just outside the television studio where I tape a program, a car pulled up beside mine and the driver, a perfect stranger, rolled down her window. "Charles, Charles," she called out, "I love your show. But get with the program. Perot in '92. We're going to do it."

This for me was a first. In 10 years of journalism, I had never been the object of a drive-by bantering. Indeed, the only thing I have ever seen that approaches the Perotomania that has seized the country is the Trudeaumania I witnessed 25 years ago growing up in Canada.Then, within the space of a few months, a wave of mass adulation propelled Pierre Trudeau, an obscure junior minister who two years earlier had been an even more obscure university professor, to the prime ministership of Canada.

What is going on today? The best one-word explanation I have heard for the Perot phenomenon (I heard it from Norman Podhoretz) is decline. American decline is the subtext of this election. People feel it. They fear it. And they are convinced that the two major parties and their candidates will do nothing about it.

Of course, Perot has not directly addressed the issue of decline. But he does not need to. He presents himself as its living antidote. His whole persona is

can-do: build a company, make a fortune, rescue hostages, win the presidency. Broke? I'll fix it, he says.

No one is demanding of him the how and the what. People seem satisfied, indeed intoxicated at the thought of someone who at least displays the will.

The reason people think of Perot as can-do, his single most important qualification for president, is his standing as a successful businessman. Perot is not the first to benefit from the American tendency to associate can-do business with can-do politics.

In 1916, write historians Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, popular petitions put Henry Ford on the presidential preference ballot of the Michigan Republican Party. He won. Two weeks later, despite his emphatic public statements that he was not a presidential candidate, he came close to winning in Nebraska.

Four decades later another auto executive, George Romney (formerly chairman of American Motors, by then governor of Michigan), was the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. (In 1966, he was the only Republican shown to be beating Lyndon Johnson. Nixon, Rockefeller and Charles Percy trailed Johnson by 8 points.)

And one forgets, but it was less than a decade ago that another auto tycoon, Lee Iacocca, was being touted as the real hope for the Democratic Party. Democratic consultant Greg Schneiders, who led an effort to draft Iacocca for president in 1986, compared him to Harry Truman.

In retrospect, these fascinations with celebrity businessmen appear bizarre.

Ford was pacifist and isolationist, deeply anti- British and virulently anti-Semitic. Romney proved intellectually accident-prone: He told an interviewer he had been "brainwashed" on Vietnam and was never taken seriously again. And Iacocca is today deservedly seen as just another overpriced corporate hack.

Yet as late as the 1988 presidential campaign people were talking up Donald Trump! At the urging of conservative Republicans he went to New Hampshire to test the waters. But the Democrats wanted a piece of him, too.

The Donald's 15 minutes are perhaps the best example of how daffy these flings with tycoons can be. Yet, these past disappointments are no deterrent to the lady in the passing car, to the thousands manning Perot booths in shopping malls, and to the millions voting Perot in the polls.

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They look at me and other Perot skeptics and see, as one colleague put it, the editors of Pravda two weeks before the August coup.

Perot's peculiar style of personal politics may in fact be what the country craves. But personal politics is always a cause for worry. I worry about a man without a program who says "trust me." I worry about a man who promises communion with the masses in the "electronic town hall."

Most of all, I worry about a man who takes his birthday seriously. My son takes his birthday seriously. But he's seven. Perot is considerably older and yet retains an inordinate attachment to the date. He left the Navy on his birthday. He founded his great business enterprise, EDS, on his birthday. He sold it to GM for $2.5 billion on his birthday. He is likely to officially announce for president on his birthday (June 27).

Perhaps if our caudillo becomes president he will declare his birthday a national holiday, a day of picnics and pardons, the way they do in banana republics.

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