One evening last winter my buddy Eugene and I were shooting the breeze while we sort of half-watched the new, citified Hee Haw (it’s not the sort of show you want to watch alone, and my wife, a nose-breather, won’t watch it with me). Eugene had just finished telling the one about the difference between Fidel Castro and a jockstrap (you really don’t want to know) when he volunteered that if he lived in Michigan or someplace he might vote for David Duke. I asked him what Michigan had to do with it. (I don’t always follow his thought processes.)

“I wouldn’t want to make North Carolina look bad.”

That made sense, in a way. But Eugene is a patriot who hasn’t forgotten World War II, so I asked him why he’d even consider voting for the boy Nazi—even if he lived in a state he wouldn’t mind embarrassing.

“Well, I probably wouldn’t do it. But who do you have to vote for to put a stop to this stuff?”

Of course, I knew what “stuff” he meant. The President we voted for raised our taxes, after saying he wouldn’t. He signed something that can be distinguished from a quota bill only by the eye of Faith. His Justice Department has been trying to reinstate Plessy v. Ferguson in Alabama higher education, and it’s using what Eugene calls the “Vote Right Act” (as in, vote right or we’ll change the rules) to create Bantustan congressional districts in North Carolina. Our sickly industries face more regulation now than Jimmy Carter ever dreamed of, and now we’re looking at a me-too health-care proposal that threatens to combine National Health efficiency and fee-for-service prices. Even in foreign affairs, where the President is supposed to know what he’s doing, he sucked up to the dictator of Communist Russia a lot longer than he had to, and he arranged the demise of a few hundred thousand Iraqis, none of them named Saddam Hussein. Now he’s put a smarmy junk bond king on his campaign finance committee, which confirms everyone’s worst suspicions about Republicans.

That’s just for starters, and without even going into what he hasn’t done. So, yeah, I knew what Eugene meant. You could say that George Bush has been a disappointment. “But give him credit,” I said. “It looks like we’re finally going to get an Elvis postage stamp.” Eugene nodded. “There is that.” “Besides,” I asked, “who else are you going to vote for? Bill Clinton? The guy whose wife dissed Tammy Wynette?” “Naw,” said Eugene, “he ain’t nothing but Jim Hunt with a sex drive.” (I guess you have to know our former governor, but maybe you can work backwards.)

We were sitting there feeling pretty blue about all this, when some old weepy country song came on the TV to remind us that there are worse things in life than politics gone bad.

How small of all that
human hearts endure

That part that kings or laws can
cause or cure.

Sam Johnson’s words, but a pure country music sentiment.

Still, I wasn’t surprised when I ran into Eugene a few months later and found him sporting a Ross Perot button. “What do you know about Perot,” I asked him. “Not a damn thing,” he said. “That’s the beauty part of it.”

Well, that appeal won’t last. By the time you read this we should all know a lot more about Mr. Perot. He could have decided not to run after all, or he could be becalmed in the single digits where most independent candidates wind up; as I write, though, the polls show this political cipher, basically a “none of the above” candidate, giving Clinton a run for second place nationally, and leading both Clinton and Bush in Texas. This could be even more entertaining than Hee Haw.

One thing that’s already fun is watching responsible commentators explain that, yes, Perot’s candidacy is amusing, but sooner or later we’re going to have to get serious. Guys, Eugene is serious. When he stops and thinks about it, he’s (all together, now) mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. When the 60’s radicals chanted “Smash the State,” Ross Perot wasn’t what they had in mind—but, for Eugene, he’ll do. Now that the Soviet threat is gone, reckless voting seems less dangerous, and the answer to the question “how much worse could it be?” isn’t that clear anymore. So maybe government wouldn’t work with Perot as President. You got a problem with that?

Perot’s appeal isn’t ideological. Who knows what his ideology is? Does he have one? Who cares? In this respect he’s like our last serious non-politician politician, Dwight Eisenhower. (Russell Kirk, you may remember, defended Ike against the John Birch Society by saying that he wasn’t a Communist, he was a golfer.) Perot certainly has opinions, on everything from high school football eligibility to abortion, but he presents them and probably sees them as simply “common sense.” If enough voters see them that way, too, he could go far.

No, Perot is, if anything, an anti-ideological candidate, with an attraction for those who are disgusted not just with government but with latter-day politics, with constant public yammering and wrangling about rights and principles.

Take Eugene again. They say a Middle Eastern moderate is someone whose motto is “Death to Extremists”—well, Eugene could buy that. He’s certainly not a liberal and you’d call most of his views conservative, but he’s not a conservative, and he doesn’t like most people who are. He’s still a registered Democrat, so he couldn’t have voted for Pat Buchanan if he’d wanted to. But he wouldn’t have anyway. As far as Eugene is concerned, anyone who is on Sunday afternoon TV is part of the problem. As he sees it, the fact that both liberals and conservatives deprecate and dislike Perot is a big point in his favor.

Something else Perot has in common with Ike is that he’s thought to be politically inexperienced. Politicos and political junkies seem to be puzzled and annoyed when voters find that charming. How dare he, you can almost hear them saying. Where are his position papers? Now, in fact, a billionaire government contractor is no more likely than a General of the Army actually to be virgo intacta, but Perot might do well to fake it. A.L. Rowse tells of a candidate for the Oxford University seat in Parliament who won hundreds of votes on the strength of one sentence in his campaign leaflet: “Agriculture. I know nothing about agriculture.” It might work for Perot, too. If nothing else, not knowing how government works means that how it works can’t be your fault.

Then there’s the Texas thing. Some sophisticates just will see Perot as an untamed gunslinger from flyover country. They prefer their Southwesterners to be Yalies like George Bush or Bill Clinton. It would be embarrassing to watch Perot go after those votes, just like it was with Lyndon. If he’s smart—and I’ve never seen it suggested that he isn’t—he’ll treat his origins the way Hilaire Belloc treated his religion, when he ran for Parliament in 1905. “Gentlemen,” Belloc told a public meeting, “I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This [taking a rosary from his pocket] is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.” (Isn’t that more manly than, say, John Kennedy’s assurances in I960 to a group of Baptist ministers that his religion wouldn’t affect his conduct in office?)

If I were advising Perot, I’d tell him: Don’t pander. Don’t apologize. Don’t “explain.” It’s not the cowboy way. Just run an in-your-face campaign that says: Here I am, a straight shooter who speaks his mind, a straight thinker who isn’t afraid of simple solutions, an obscenely rich man who can’t be bought by special interests because they can’t afford me.

But here I am fantasizing about giving advice to a man who’s Eugene’s candidate, not mine. Me—well, I’ll probably wind up being “responsible” again. I mean, who wants the election decided by the House of Representatives? But obviously even I find something attractive about this candidacy, so let me say one more thing about it. Some folks I’ve talked to profess to find Perot a little frightening. But what ought to scare them is the alienation and frustration, the wrecking impulse, that he’s tapping. All things considered, it seems to me that voting for Ross Perot is a pretty harmless way for that to surface.