‘92-Model Perot’s a Hard Sell With the Boys on the Car Lot
The public professes to scorn the car salesman. In fact, if polls are to be believed, car salesmen are admired only by themselves, their children and their spouses--and maybe even then just out of loyalty.
Nobody gives them credit for embodying some of America’s most treasured ideals about work.
But consider: Their hours are long and their attitude positive. They are the elemental small-business men and women of the American economy. They are paid for what they do, nothing more. They survive on their skill and initiative, without subsidy or sympathy. They thrill to the deal and thrive on competition, one-on-one or global, you name it.
If you are one of those who always puts them at the bottom of your list, you’ll have to ponder these contradictions for yourself.
As for me, car salesmen and saleswomen represent valuable assayers of character and motive and intent, and they grasp as well as anyone the urgency of human impulse. Salesmen possessing such instincts thrive on the asphalt lots; those who do not find themselves looking for work that pays wages.
So driving through the heartland, I sought out car salesmen on the subject of the 1992 presidential race--in particular this exasperating, possibly exciting phenomenon of big-business billionaire politician Ross Perot, himself once a computer salesman.
“Nut,” says Bob Weber, a former radio morning-drive disc jockey who now sells for Naperville Jeep-Eagle-Hummer outside Chicago. “I agree with (Republican campaign ad man) Roger Ailes; he’ll get a majority of the vote in the insane asylums.”
Weber says he was intrigued by Perot back when the Texas billionaire first offered himself as a national leader. Weber figured Perot’s billions were the sum of an unusual man’s extraordinary skills. Might such boardroom abilities prove effective in redirecting America?
But Perot’s haughty withdrawal and his remanufactured revival convince Weber that Perot “lacks the temperament, the skill to run our complicated country.”
As Weber sees it, Perot, in a short period, has forgone his image as a dynamic let’s-get-it-done bulldog of an American success story. He skipped the “hard work” in the middle of the campaign. Now he is trying to persuade the country he really is nothing more than a lap-dog for a disingenuous and anonymous group of political dilettantes--his state coordinators, whom he called to Dallas on Monday and asked whether he should re-enter the race.
“Who are these people?” Weber asks. “Is this how Perot is going to make every decision? It’s one way to avoid responsibility or blame. . . .
“Would I buy a car from Perot? Humm. Well, I don’t think right now Perot could say whether he wants to sell me a car. I think he’d have to go ask his volunteers. And if I hear that volunteer stuff anymore, I’m, excuse me, going to be sick. . . .”
That was the harshest view I heard. But other car salesmen shared the opinion that Perot had squandered the very thing that appealed most to the mind of the businessman--the aura of a decisive leader.
“At first I thought, here’s a guy who thinks like I think, who would work on problems like I would work on problems,” says Charles Betts, owner of Betts Cadillac-Lexus in Des Moines.
“But as I watched the thing unfold, I put myself in his shoes. . . . And I found out I couldn’t do it; he couldn’t do it. Our approach is foreign to government. He wouldn’t stand a factory girl’s chance. . . .”
A factory girl’s chance?
“Don’t quote me. It’s an old Detroit saying, but it’s taken as a slam at working people, and I don’t mean it that way. I guess it’s like Perot when he spoke to blacks and called them ‘you people,’ as if there were different kinds.”
I use the quote anyway, not to be mean, but to underline Betts’ point about the bumpy ride awaiting those who seek to traverse Democracy’s road.
Both Betts and Weber say they will vote GOP in 1992, but not enthusiastically. “I feel the Democratic Congress perceives me as having more than my share and they mean to redistribute it. At least with Bush, it’s gridlock,” says Betts.
Here in Wichita, Steven J. Echer is manager of truck sales for Quality Chevrolet-Geo. He’s of a mixed mind about Perot.
On one hand, Echer says, “I think he’s gypped the American public. He says one thing and does another. Maybe he’s like a car salesman, OK?”
On the other, Echer fears the standard Democrat versus Republican debate is getting America nowhere but into debt. “Some say that Perot might not be able to manage the country. But the others haven’t done such a great job either, right?”
The odd thing about Echer, the all-American odd thing about him, is that while expressing his standard-brand frustration with politics, he also insists on finding something in each of the candidates to believe in.
Bush has participated in the end of the Cold War, “which has taken a tremendous strain and fear off everybody.”
Clinton “reminds me of John Kennedy; I just can’t tell you why I like the man.”
And Perot’s call for shared sacrifice to pay off the national debt strikes Echer as overdue. “Just make it fair and I think people are more willing to do something than ever.”
