FOCUS: Orange County Focus is dedicated on Monday to analysis of community news, a look at what’s ahead and the voices of local people. : IN PERSON : A Disenchanted Perot Advocate Remains Wary

The nation’s growing disenchantment with its dominant political parties is no mystery to Roland Boucher, a Yale-educated electronics engineer who soldiered in Ross Perot’s army of discontent during the 1992 presidential election year.

And Boucher is still unhappy.

“Ross promised that we were going to have an open organization, that we’re the boss and he’s Ross, and we were suckers enough to believe it,” said Boucher, who organized a district of 8,000 Orange County Perot supporters for United We Stand America during the last presidential election.

“We tried to make an organization that allowed everybody to speak, where the average person could come to a meeting and propose something.”

Although Perot received 24% of the 1992 presidential vote in Orange County, Boucher says United We Stand and Perot’s newly minted Reform Party have failed to move beyond the cult of the Perot personality.

“The problem I have now is determining what the platform is of this famous party. It was different when they were electing Perot; they didn’t need a platform. They had a candidate.

“But we never finished a national platform. How can you have a party where one guy runs it? What are we signing on to? What are we agreeing to? Are we agreeing that whatever Ross says is OK by us? No matter what the hell it is? I have a problem with the structure not being there.”

Complaints aside, however, Boucher is still a member of United We Stand America and continues to attend the organization’s meetings.

The prospect of a presidential campaign by retired Gen. Colin Powell seemed to offer the best of both worlds to those in search of alternatives to the political status quo, according to Boucher: an outsider running within an organized political party.

“I was hopeful with Colin Powell. We really have some lunatic fringes out there, a lot of people who have gone off the deep end and who need to be pulled back into the reservation. A calm hand could have done it and the general was as good a choice as any to do that. I don’t see a politician doing it. You need a healing hand.”

Tinkering--political and otherwise--comes naturally to Boucher, an inventor who holds a patent for a noiseless electric motor. As a project manager for Hughes Aircraft, Boucher spent one week each month in Washington during the 1960s trying to interest politicians and government agencies in the company’s products. But after a decade rubbing shoulders with the powers that be, Boucher began to lose faith in the government’s willingness to embrace new ideas.

A lifelong Republican, Boucher said the election of Ronald Reagan temporarily subdued his growing political dissatisfaction.

“Reagan came along and changed the way government ran. He said he was going to do things for the people, take the bureaucracy off our backs. He was going to lower the tax rates, he was going to open up the process. Well, he did that to a certain extent,” Boucher said.

“But when George Bush was elected, we had little faith that he had any idea what Reagan was talking about. Reagan was a man of the people and Bush was a preppy.”

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The Bush presidency--and the far-right opposition it attracted--reinvigorated political malcontents, especially in Orange County, according to Boucher, a member of the Orange County Charter Committee and avid flat-tax advocate.

“A lot of us felt that the Republican Party was captured by extremes, and the 1992 Republican convention in Dallas proved it to us. It did not represent Republicans in general.

“The continuing problem for Republicans in Orange County and elsewhere is that we’re not allowed to voice much of an opinion here. [GOP leaders] don’t take votes, they just want to run things. The same problem that happened to the Republican Party and the Democratic Party didn’t take too long until it started to happen to United We Stand.”

Many of the Orange County voters who embraced Ross Perot in 1992 were motivated by concerns over the federal budget deficit and the seeming unwillingness of politicians to reduce it, Boucher said. Those concerns are still there.

“We have a fiscal problem and we have a corrosion of confidence caused by special interest money buying themselves tax indulgences and giveaways of every kind. This is the kind of stuff we’ve got to cure. We have a problem of not facing reality.”

Boucher expects more movement toward political alternatives of all kinds, more fracturing of the American people into splinter groups, unless the Democratic and Republican parties renounce inflexible political ideology. A defiantly independent thinker, Boucher said he would rather work within a reformed Republican Party than a poorly defined, third-party alternative.

“We can’t let the fringe of both parties ruin each party, which is exactly what’s happening,” Boucher said. “I hear it all the time, ‘We need a third party.’ But what is this third party going to stand for? If it’s not going to stand for anything substantially different than the other two political parties, then it’s a waste of time.”

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Profile:

Roland Boucher

Age: 63

Residence: Costa Mesa

Education: Master’s degree in electrical engineering from Yale University

Family: Wife, Nancy; grown son and daughter

Background: A private pilot, Boucher sells noiseless electric motors to model airplane manufacturers and hobbyists; was an organizer for Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign; is a member of the Orange County Charter Committee and chairman of United Californians for Tax Reform, a flat-tax advocacy group

Attitude: “Being in Washington, D.C., one week a month for 10 years of my life, I learned to hate the place. They think they are the United States. But . . . they’re not much help, most of the time.”

Source: Roland Boucher; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times

Los Angeles Times