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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Perot Perplexing For Reform Party With Him They Lose, Without Him They Die

Kansas City Star

They adopted a constitution. They elected officers. They passed a platform.

But as the Reform Party delegates packed their bags Sunday and departed Kansas City, they left their biggest task unfinished: deciding what to do about Ross Perot, the party’s founder and 1996 presidential candidate.

Call it the Perot Paradox. The party probably can’t win with him, and it may not be able to win without him.

So what should it do?

Until that question is resolved, the Reform Party’s future will remain a matter of conjecture. Perot’s foundering popularity must be restored if he wants to be a viable presidential option in 2000.

Or he must back away and hope that a captivating new leader emerges who can attract voters the way Perot did in 1992.

So far, that leader has yet to appear.

“If it’s going to be a party at all, it’s going to have to broaden itself and get away from being the cult of one person’s personality,” said Bill Lyons, a political scientist at the University of Tennessee. “And I don’t know that this one can make the transition.”

Perot himself has heard the skepticism about his continuing role in the Reform effort.

“If you’d like me to go away, I will,” he said in the opening moments of his hourlong address to the party Saturday night. “If you’d like me to stay, I will. So why don’t we take a quick vote?”

But the Texas billionaire shouldn’t be misled by the lack of dissension his call drew amid the frenzied excitement of a national political convention. Although Perot remains a crowd favorite, plenty of people inside the hall and around the country still harbor doubts about the party’s future with Perot at the helm.

The convention came at a precarious time for third-party movements. For the first time this decade, less than half the public - 47 percent - thinks the country should have a third major party, according to an August poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

But even if Perot were to magically disappear from the national scene, the Reform Party lacks the type of readily recognized back-up leader that it might need to survive.

Rep. James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat, galvanized the crowd Sunday with his anti-trade rhetoric and his insistence that the Reform Party already ranks as the country’s second major political party.

The first, he said, is the Democrats and Republicans, who are so similar that they count as only one party.

“The Reform Party is the hope of so many people,” he said.

Yet Traficant, who hinted in his speech that he might be interested in switching parties and running for high office, is no national figure.

Others party members point to former Sen. David Boren of Oklahoma or Pat Choate, the party’s 1996 vice presidential nominee. But Boren has not indicated any interest in joining the party, and Choate also lacks national stature.

So Perot remains the party’s main man.

“They definitely can’t win with him,” Lyons said. “And I don’t know that they can survive without him.”