Ross Perot remains popular in the polls despite, or perhaps because of, an economic message that is simplistic, superficial and totally unrelated to the perennial problems of actually governing.
It's the thrust of what he is saying that has public appeal, not the specifics, of which there are few. It amounts to a warning to keep the taxes and spending down, and who could quarrel with that?Perot himself is wearing thin in Washington, where his pompous testimony before Congress and his trumped-up polls designed to show public support for him are viewed with the scorn they deserve.
He keeps saying things that real-life politicians who have to make real-life decisions find silly. But neither the president nor anyone else is eager to take him to task publicly unless truly pressed, out of fear of offending his supporters.
Unlike the Senate Republicans, who knew exactly what they were talking about when they defeated the president's stimulus package, for instance, Perot ridiculed the bill but never grasped what was in it.
His recent appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" was a classic example of his glib gab.
Perot complained that the president's bill would not have produced jobs, as the president claimed, but only make-work or non-job jobs. This is an easy shot, when aimed at the section of the bill that gave communities grants for wish lists that included those infamous comforts of the sporting life: alpine slides and warming huts.
But then Perot was asked if repairing and building bridges and highways, for which the bill also called, did not require actual work. Perot babbled on about how most of that work too would be wasted, since it would not be done on repairing "real infrastructure".
He makes a distinction between what is "needed" and what isn't. He would build those bridges that are essential and not build those that aren't.
And here we get to a fundamental difference between reality and fantasy.
It is cute to say that some politically neutral expert should decide the relative merits of what gets built and what doesn't get built. Warming huts don't sound terribly essential.
But how does one know whether a rural passageway that provides the only route to market for a few hundred farmers is as important as another lane for a fast-speed highway carrying hundreds of thousands of commuters a day?
It is impossibly tedious for presidents, presidential candidates or would-be presidential advisers to publicly debate the relative merits of this bridge vs. that one. But sweeping generalities must come closer to the nub of what governing is all about than Perot manages to do.