I didn’t like Perot, because I saw that he would split the GOP vote, and I always thought the Clintons put him up to running for that reason.
On the other hand, I have come to realize that the Bushes and the Clintons were joined at the hip, involved in a lot of the same skullduggery. So maybe Perot was the more honest alternative, had enough of us seen it. It took a lot of water under the bridge before I began to see it.
At that time, I was much more a “free-marketer” and so I accepted that NAFTA was a good thing. In fact, being as I was pretty young at the time, I thought opening the border to Mexico and Canada would be a good thing all around. Again, it took a couple decades of water under the bridge for me to begin to see the damage.
Perot was telling us a lot of what Trump was telling us. The difference was, three decades later, I was ready to hear it. Had we listened to Perot we might have saved ourselves some pain.
Perot tried to execute the Trump campaign plan, but he didn’t have the support of the patriots and too many conservatives still thought the GOP was the GOP of Reagan.
See my post #8.
Im with you on with every word you wrote, including my youthful disdain for Perot (and support of NAFTA — and my change of mind over the years as Perot warnings have been vindicated. I’m afraid it’s too late to bring home the jobs and industries we lost by following the Clinton-Bush path of offshoring. Trump is trying in targeted ways, but the forces of globalism are arrayed against him, and when he’s gone I don’t see any political leaders who will carry on the fight. The GOP remains in the pockets of the big donors; they’re just waiting out Trump so they can revert to the status quo. And they’re pretty successful in obstructing him in the meantime
Perot was a prophet without honor, on the trade issue. I was one of those who sneered at him