Perot Dodges The Big One Texas Businessman Won’t Say If He’ll Run For President Again

Texas businessman Ross Perot was back on “Larry King Live” Friday night to promote his budding Reform Party, and he challenged independent voters to “come together” in 1996 to elect their own president.

But as much as his host tried, Perot refused to make a clear statement of his own intentions about running again this year. At times he sounded as if he were ready to run. Asked whether he would attack President Clinton or the probable Republican nominee, Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole, Kan., if they attacked him, Perot said, “I didn’t last time and I won’t this time.”

At other times, he hedged. “We don’t want this in any way focused on one individual, including me,” he said when King pressed him about running.

On Tuesday, Perot told a radio station that if the members of the Reform Party want him to run, he would give it “everything I’ve got.”

That prompted Dole, who believes his hopes for the presidency would be diminished by a Perot candidacy, to say the Republicans were the reform party because they had pushed many of the items on Perot’s agenda.