Perot Offers Scenario for a Candidacy

WASHINGTON — Proclaiming that America is “in deep voodoo,” Texas industrialist H. Ross Perot said Wednesday that he will run for President as an independent in November if his supporters can get his name on the ballot in all 50 states.

Perot, 61, a controversial and combative maverick, told a National Press Club luncheon audience that efforts have begun in every state to gather enough signatures to meet petition requirements.

The “one scenario under which I’d run,” Perot said, would be if “ordinary people in 50 states went out in the streets on their own initiative--not orchestrated, not programmed like rabbits, the way we try to do everything now--(and) put me on the ballot.”

A self-made billionaire, Perot heads a computer-services company, Perot Systems. Perot on Wednesday called for drastic action to reduce the federal debt, which has ballooned from $1 trillion at the time Ronald Reagan became President in 1981 to $4 trillion today. “Maybe it was voodoo economics,” Perot said. “Whatever it was, we are now in deep voodoo.”