The first campaign that I worked on was Jerry Brown's "Take Back America" 92 Presidential campaign. I never liked Clinton, even at the time, I felt that he was too conservative and that New Democrats were too conservative. I didn't vote for Clinton in 92 because I worked on the Perot campaign.
I'm fascinated that people today believe that Perot attracted only conservative voters. This was not true. In fact the news papers of 1992 wrote that about half of Perot's votes came from liberals.
Yesterday, I had a casual conversation with a gentleman that I know well and respect. He's a good person, and runs his own business, and is very active as a volunteer in community groups. He has a nice quiet life.
Somehow, we were talking about sports, and it came out that he supported Perot in 1992. It told him that I worked on the Perot campaign, and I fondly remembered many meetings and events and I loved spending a night on the Trenton-Makes bridge to the cheering honking of various drivers who drove by. We didn't win, but I was active in the Perot organization and the organization called United-We-Stand-America.
Somehow in my conversation, my friend made the point that the "Tea Party" is trying to further the same goals that Perot did in 1992.
I'm the kind of person who listens to people's opinions, even if I don't agree with them, and I almost always keep my disagreements silent unless I know a way to gently express them.
My guess is that my friend is really too busy to understand the differences between what we did in 1992 and the Tea Party of today, so I thought it might be fun to share my opinions.
The only similarity that I see between the Tea Party, and the Perot organization of 1992-93 is the feeling that the deficit is way out of control and is a kind of time-bomb for our culture. Perot spoke a lot about controlling the deficit. I still believe that a high deficit is a way of grabbing power for corporate interests and bankers.
For me that's where the similarities end. Here are some of the differences:
The Tea Party has a goal of establishing a state religion, and that state religion is a kind of Christianity that I don't belong to. We never ever spoke about such a thing in the Perot organization. Perot was pro-choice (does anyone remember that?).
The Perot organization had a lot of people who were skeptical of all globalization. We wanted to reduce the corporate power over our government and our everyday lives. The Tea Party seems to be in favor of corporate power as an ally who will defeat their hated foe, the government.
The Perot organization had minorities and progressives among its ranks (like me). We had a whole lot of diversity in people and ideas.
We were not angry, we never stirred each other up and called anyone the devil or Hitler.
I came to the Perot campaign directly from the Jerry Brown campaign. I saw Perot as a voice who would stand up to the established corporate power. Obviously Perot turned out to be a bit different than who I thought he was, but there were plenty of people like me in the Perot organization, and I agreed with many of them. Among the active members of the first year of UWSA (which there were not so many), we were all progressives who were skeptical of the NAFTA and GATT treaties, and many of us looked at GATT as a loss of sovereignty.
Those are my observations. I'd be interested in the opinions of others who worked for Perot or UWSA.
I feel it is useful for progressives to understand how people are attracted to the Tea Party. We are foolish to believe that we can and should waste our energy trying to defeat the Tea Party, when we simply need to point out the truth that the people who follow the Tea Party have been duped.
I see the Tea Party as being a whole bunch of people who used to be middle-class, and now are lower middle-class. They are angry because they have been robbed. In an incredible feat of social engineering, the Tea Party was created to turn their anger away from the people who did this to them. We need to undue this.