Perot Says His Group Will Influence All ’94 Federal Races : Politics: In TV interview, he spells out United We Stand agenda. He also attacks Clinton health plan, but members have yet to consider it.

Ross Perot pledged that his political organization will influence every 1994 House and Senate race and said President Clinton’s health care plan is “an airplane with no wings.”

In an interview broadcast Sunday, Perot said the agenda of his United We Stand, America, Inc. organization will be headed by calls for spending discipline, government reforms, campaign finance overhaul, term limits and a balanced budget amendment. The group’s planning meeting isn’t slated until next month.

At first, Perot said it would be up to leaders of United We Stand state chapters whether to add health care. But later in the 45-minute C-SPAN interview, he delivered a lengthy criticism of the Clinton plan.

Perot also renewed his charge that Clinton had “opened the Treasury” to buy enough votes to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Perot vehemently opposed.

While Perot’s standing in national polls fell sharply after NAFTA passed, the 1992 independent presidential candidate said: “As far as grass-roots America is concerned, as far as our membership is concerned, it had no impact.”

Perot said United We Stand now has leaders in every congressional district in the country and that the organization would sponsor issue forums and debates throughout the election year.

“Our people will be very active in trying to get voter awareness and involvement in every race in the House of Representatives and every race in the Senate,” Perot said in the interview, conducted in his hometown of Texarkana, Tex.

Perot also renewed his 20-year claim that the government deliberately left Americans behind at the end of the Vietnam War and suggested that he had evidence that some were alive and being used for slave labor.

When pressed, he refused to elaborate.

“When I say it, they will move them, but we have a pretty good idea where they are,” Perot said.

He said “all should be accounted for” before the United States lifts its trade embargo against Vietnam. But Perot said there was a growing sentiment to “go ahead and recognize them and just write these men off.”

Perot said his conversations with average Americans during his travels had convinced him that the public is deeply skeptical of the heavy government role in Clinton’s health care plan.

He said his personal view was that the government should prove itself first by improving veterans hospitals and making needed reforms in Medicare and Medicaid.

He said the organizational chart of Clinton’s health care bureaucracy “makes the Pentagon look like a ballet dancer. That thing is designed to fail.”

“We have a system that needs dramatic improvement,” Perot said. “But just turning it over to the federal government, with its history of mediocrity and failure in managing social programs and its total lack of discipline on spending when it comes to social programs . . . this is an airplane with no wings.”