Against All Odds : Running for president can be habit-forming. Perot is but the latest in a long line of perpetual candidates.

Ross Perot’s decision to run again for president is about as surprising as yesterday’s weather report. Having already run two unsuccessful campaigns in 1992--his abortive spring bid followed by his return to the hustings in September--you would think he had had enough of electoral politics. True, he got 19% of the popular vote, but he didn’t come close to winning a single electoral ballot and polls now show he won’t do any better this time. Indeed, his current 14% support could well shrink by November. His overbearing manner and zany ideas about who’s out to get him will remind many voters why they didn’t find him a credible alternative to Bill Clinton or George Bush in ’92.

Why then does Perot bother to run? Even more puzzling, why are former Colorado Gov. Richard D. Lamm and public advocate Ralph Nader joining Perot in futile bids for the unobtainable?

Lamm’s gloomy picture of American prospects and insistence on sacrifices, especially by the elderly of some of their Medicare entitlements, will hardly make for a winning campaign. Nor is it possible to imagine Nader’s muckraking zeal translating into a popular campaign.

Perot, Lamm and Nader have plenty of rationalizations for running. Each must be salivating at the thought of competing against Bob Dole. To say that Dole has little hold on the public’s imagination is to imply he will find a way in the next three and half months to generate some enthusiasm for his campaign.

As for Clinton, no doubt Perot, Lamm and Nader must comfort themselves with the thought that almost anything can happen. Whitewater, the FBI files, a stock-market collapse or any number of potential foreign-policy failures may all have the power to trip up the president.

But even without these calculations, Perot, Lamm, and Nader see ample reason to run. U.S. history is replete with examples of leading political figures, as well as third-party and fringe candidates, who never expected to win, but ran--and, in some cases, kept running--for the sake of the national well-being. How else can you explain the Federalist Charles C. Pinckney, whose three unsuccessful campaigns between 1800 and 1808 became exercises in political futility? Much the same can be said of Sen. Henry Clay’s three failed bids for the White House as the Whig Party candidate between 1824 and 1844; and Democrat William Jennings Bryan’s, which left him a distant second in 1896, 1900 and 1908.

But at least Pinckney, Clay and Bryan ran as major-party candidates, with some limited hope of winning. America’s third-party/fringe aspirants had other motives for making the personal sacrifices required in a national campaign. Most were true believers. Gen. James B. Weaver, the Greenback-Labor candidate in 1880 and the People’s Party man in 1892, was determined to ease the suffering of farmers and laborers in a rapidly industrializing nation, in which concentrated wealth and power had closed doors of opportunity and seemed to be creating a class of permanently impoverished citizens.

Prohibition and Socialist Party candidates between 1884 and 1920 also saw themselves as crusaders against suffering and injustice. None could possibly have hoped to reach the White House. While Eugene V. Debs, the four-time Socialist nominee, at least remains a name to reckon with in American history, who remembers the Prohibitionist challengers--John P. St. John, Clinton B. Fisk, John Bidwell, John C. Wooley, Silas C. Swallow, Eugene W. Chafin or J.F. Hanly? Debs and his Prohibitionist counterparts never won a single electoral vote. And though Debs won more than 900,000 popular votes in two elections, the Prohibitionists never attracted more than a quarter-million supporters.

Yet, despite their limited gains at the polls, the Populists saw the Progressives enact some of their most passionately advocated reforms. Similarly, the Prohibitionists, for all the obscurity of their presidential candidates and anemic voter support, won passage of the 18th Amendment, banning the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors in a 13-year “great experiment.” The Socialists, as well, never came close to taking the White House--but they took satisfaction from the rise of a welfare state in the 1930s and 1960s, which went far toward humanizing the American industrial system with a safety net of government programs for the poor and elderly.

In contrast with these success stories, recent third-party campaigns demonstrate that fringe candidates usually win little for all their efforts. William Lemke’s conservative Union Party in 1936, backed by Father Charles F. Coughlin and Francis E. Townsend, had little impact on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In 1948, Henry A. Wallace’s Progressives made little headway against Harry S. Truman’s anti-Soviet containment policy; nor did Strom Thurman’s Dixiecrats, despite 39 electoral votes, do much to slow the march toward desegregation in the South. And Harold E. Stassen, our most persistent aspirant for the Oval Office, never got much more than ego satisfaction from his repeated campaigns for president.

But some third-party campaigns have reflected a significant shift in political mood. In 1968, George C. Wallace’s American Independent Party, which won nearly 10 million popular votes--one in every seven--and 46 electoral ones, was a harbinger of the South’s shift from the Democratic to the more conservative Republican Party.

Does Perot’s return to the national scene suggest a similar kind of change coming in the American political landscape? There seems little question but that Perot is a spokesman for current public discontent with the existing parties and candidates. But this time around, Perot seems almost like stale news. The deficit is not quite the problem he says it is, and the solutions he suggests for economic ills are less than compelling.

In a recent TV appearance, Perot declared that all politicians are really actors playing a role. Clinton and Dole, in other words, were doing nothing more than mouthing lines aimed at winning them the presidency. Perot, by contrast, would have us believe that his selfless determination to benefit the nation is the only consideration making him run. No doubt Perot believes his own rhetoric; but anyone who thinks that this hugely egotistical Texan is our modern-day Cincinnatus would do well to consider the man’s long history of self-serving actions.

Like his competitors for the presidency, Perot is an ambitious, driven character who says that he, above all, can rescue American from itself. But to do that, he would first have to be elected president.*