As a prognosticator, Ross Perot enjoys the track record of a fly-by-night fortuneteller: He is seldom held accountable for his false alarms, his fantastic claims and his fictionalized version of reality.
This hasn't stopped him from sharing a soapbox with the vice president - or holding the trump card on the North American Free Trade Agreement.A look at Perot's prognosticating during last year's campaign - particularly claims concerning a "December surprise" and American POWs - shows a wanton disregard for facts and a deftness for walking away from error. It also suggests that the anti-NAFTA crusader, who huffs about the "giant sucking sound" (of jobs flowing to Mexico), may be hyper-ven-tilating about the trade pact.
Perot's agenda this autumn has been to convince workers that special interests in Washington are conspiring to steal their jobs through NAFTA by relocating industry south of the border. But last autumn he was darkly intoning about another political conspiracy - this one to defer a massive collapse of the banking system until after the November election. He dubbed it the "December Surprise."
There's a reason Perot has dropped the "December surprise" from his stump speech. It never happened. Five days after Perot said the doomsday would occur, the nation's banks were still standing. In fact, banks are having a banner year.
Perot's frequent outbursts about American prisoners of war held in Vietnam is another case of fear triumphing over facts. An exhaustive yearlong Senate investigation on the POW-MIA issue earlier this year concluded that there was "no compelling evidence" that any Americans remain alive in captivity today.
Perot's potshot patterns are the same in both the POW and trade debates. He claims that "even the strongest NAFTA supporters now acknowledge that the agreement will cost U.S. jobs." However, the great majority of economists believe just the opposite. NAFTA levels the playing field for the American worker, and opens up a massive new market for goods and services that have been kept out of Mexico by high tariffs.
"We can't continue the status quo with Mexico," U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor told us recently.
"The rules are stacked against American workers. This is what confuses me about this (Perot's) position or others."
Perot's politics may be more enlightened than his economics. Kantor, who was Clinton's campaign manager, said Clinton understood that opposing NAFTA during the campaign might have cinched the election. "We would have locked in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Pennsylvania. That would have locked in the election. We could have stopped campaigning at that moment. He (Clinton) didn't do it because he thought it was irresponsible."
Acting responsibly has never been a constraint for Perot.