Can This Man Be Taken Seriously? : Yet another baffling turn in Perot’s roller-coaster candidacy

Ross Perot has accused President Bush’s reelection campaign of turning loose its “dirty tricks” department last summer to smear his youngest daughter, disrupt her wedding and wiretap into his company’s financial affairs, all in an effort to force him to end his independent presidential candidacy. The injection of these singular allegations so very late in the campaign raises questions of obvious interest and concern. The most compelling is whether the Texas billionaire’s imagination might not now be running wildly out of control.

Perot conceded in several interviews and at a campaign rally on Sunday and then in a press conference on Monday that he could not offer a shred of evidence in support of his claims.

He maintains that he received information about the alleged dirty tricks from three different sources, two of whom, he says, had close ties to the Republican campaign. The only source he would name is known to the media and to the FBI as a publicity seeker and teller of tall tales.

For the rest, Perot demands that his allegations be accepted on trust. At a heated press conference Monday Perot said he was “sick and tired of you all questioning my integrity without a basis for it.” But the basis for being suspicious about his story--and so inevitably about the motivations behind it--is the utter lack of corroboration offered by the candidate or any finding by law enforcement agencies to bolster his claims. Add to that a well-documented and several-decades-long history over the course of which Perot has professed to see any number of plots and conspiracies directed against him, and the reasons for being suspicious about his story become clear.

Could it be true? Of course. After all, people who have a vested interest in Bush’s reelection are now known to have used the State Department’s files and overseas posts to try to dig up dirt on Democratic candidate Bill Clinton and even on the Arkansas governor’s mother. So Republican dirty tricks directed against Perot certainly can’t be ruled out. But did dirty tricksters do the things Perot alleges? Take my word for it, says Perot. That’s not good enough.

When Perot abandoned his presidential effort in July he publicly said not a word about any Republican-originated smears against his family. He was quitting the race, he said then, because he was impressed by the tone of the Democratic National Convention, he had succeeded in making the deficit a key issue in the campaign and he did not want to risk having the election decided by the House of Representatives because of an Electoral College deadlock.

Whatever the substance behind that explanation, it also has to be noted--especially in the light of Perot’s press conference performance Monday--that by last July he had become increasingly uncomfortable as media scrutiny of his business practices and character grew more intense. His withdrawal from the race effectively ended these investigations.

Can Perot’s latest claims be true? Possibly. Are they believable? Uncorroborated, they pretty clearly are not. That’s something more for voters to weigh with just a week to go now before Election Day.