There is no problem so great in American society that it cannot be dealt with on the telephone.
That`s one of the messages of the 1992 presidential campaign. If you`re worried about health care or tax fairness or corruption in Congress or the sorry state of American schools, well, pick up the phone.
You can call former California Gov. Jerry Brown at that celebrated 800 number, or you can call Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot down in Dallas at the toll-free number he`s sponsoring. Perot has a couple of skyscrapers he`s leasing to facilitate his humble, just-folks campaign for the White House.
In fact, you probably can reach Perot`s political operation closer to your home, at a phone number staffed by volunteers eager to get their man on the November ballot in 50 states.
Or, you can wait until Perot`s next appearance on CNN, where his unofficial campaign manager, talk-show host Larry King, will listen as the Great Man responds to questions with his sly chuckle and his boundless supply of Texarkana colloquialisms.
Disappointed by their professional politicians, Americans are ringing up Perot at every opportunity. They`re mad as hell, and Perot says he`s mad, too. It`s a thoroughly modern alliance of the speed-dialing disenchanted and a man who says what this country requires is a can-do outsider with a sharp pencil.
At least one of the problems in that mix is that Perot is an outsider in the same sense that Lee Iacocca is a car salesman or Frank Perdue is a chicken farmer.
Perot may be smart, savvy and effective as a businessman, but he has played the game. In large measure, his riches came through the development of a computer operation that serviced Medicaid and Medicare, the epitome of large, unwieldy and costly government entitlement programs.
He has a gaudy record of fixing things, but in many cases, he fixes them in precisely the same way the bad guys in Washington fix them.
There`s Alliance Airport down in Ft. Worth, for example. It`s a private deal, and Perot and his son, Ross Jr., have received millions of dollars from Uncle Sam to develop the project.
The senior Perot lately has taken to characterizing the airport as his son`s endeavor, but Ross Jr. told Newsweek that Alliance was a ”combined effort,” father and son.
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Until recently, the airport was considered a model of cooperation between the public and private sectors, one hand washing the other.
Since Perot`s independent presidential bid gathered steam, however, a request for an additional $120 million from the federal government to extend the airport runway has stalled.
The project ran into problems at the Federal Aviation Administration after First Son George W. Bush (he`s the one who owns a baseball team in Texas) came to Washington to tell his father and the Bush re-election team they`d better start worrying about the billionaire populist.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last week indicated that many voters were not at all disturbed at the notion Perot might spend $100 million of his own money to bankroll his independent White House effort.
Fifty-one percent of those responding thought it was a ”good thing”
because Perot wouldn`t be taking ”special-interest money.”
Perot and his son were not averse to passing out that special-interest money when they were building Alliance Airport.
For example, there is the matter of the reported $133,000 Perot and his family members have given to congressional leaders and candidates since 1983. Nothing wrong with that, but it`s hard to believe the family largess wasn`t in some way connected to the millions of federal dollars made available for Alliance Airport.
For example, there was plenty of support along the way from the longtime Democratic congressman from Ft. Worth, former Speaker of the House Jim Wright, who got his share of the campaign contributions.
If you`re really angry with the system, you can ring up another self-proclaimed outsider, Jerry Brown.
According to The Washington Post, Brown, who is 54, has received $20,000 a year from his parents (his father is a former two-term governor) since he left the governor`s post in 1983. Those same parents paid for half of a $1.2 million home Jerry bought in San Francisco three years ago. No question, he`s a rebel.
Talking to Ross and Jerry on the telephone, you might find easy answers to hard questions. But you`d be better off calling up friends and family to wish them a happy Easter.