Sure enough, within hours of Lamm’s nervous announcement of his candidacy last week, Ross Perot told TV viewers that everything he had been saying all of these months about how ““it’s not about me’’ was – how did the Watergate folks once put it? – inoperative. Perot would run for the nomination of the party he built after all. The usual Washington wise guys immediately began figuring how the Texas billionaire’s latest gambit would affect the Clinton-Dole race. Lamm’s no-sacred-cows message of limiting Social Security and Medicare for the affluent (interview, page 64) was unusual, they concluded, but he would prove a footnote – a way for Perot to make it look as if his toy party believes in democracy.
The odds obviously favor Perot. Yet there was something about the urgency of Perot’s announcement that suggested even he is a little worried that Lamm is a newer, more plausible face for 1996. The former governor, once a good friend of Bill Clinton’s, mixes political experience as a pro-choice, pro-green progressive with the kind of righteous indignation about unbalanced budgets that plays well with fed-up voters. Lamm may be a Cassandra, but at least no one thinks he’s crazy.
““Talking to people in the Reform Party, I found that while they love, honor and respect Ross Perot,’’ Lamm told NEWSWEEK, ““they don’t think he is the best person to take it to the next stage.’’ The decision began to jell on June 1 when Lamm addressed the California Reform Party, by far the largest in the country. Since then, two thirds of the leadership of the California party have endorsed him. Leaders of the Oregon and Minnesota Reform parties did the same. A bored press corps can now be expected to hop on the Lamm story.
While Perot’s talents as a control freak should not be underestimated, he is operating under certain restrictions. A big accounting firm (which Perot, in his typically autocratic fashion, won’t yet name) is auditing the process to make sure no one cheats, and Perot promised Lamm he would spend none of his own money contacting the 1.3 million party members and petition signers from all 50 states who can vote.
Hard-core Perotistas won’t turn over their founder’s party without a fight. ““What we have here is four years of organizational effort on behalf of Ross Perot,’’ says Illinois Reform Party chair Dawn Larson. But while many of the petition passers were paid by Perot, many of the petition signers agreed to join up only after receiving assurances they were not committing to him. ““The proposition that Perot controls these people is absurd,’’ says Gordon Black, a polltaker who has occasionally advised Perot. ““These are people who will listen carefully to what both men have to say – then vote on it.''
The process works like this: After an initial round of voting by mail, Perot, Lamm and anyone else who wins 10 percent of the early nominating ballots will address the Aug. 11 convention in Long Beach, Calif. Attendees can then vote from the floor; other participants watching on C-Span can mail, e-mail or phone in their choice. The nominee will be announced Academy Award-style on Aug. 18 in Valley Forge, Pa., with the winner choosing his own running mate. Because polling the 1.3 million eligible voters is virtually impossible, the outcome is likely to remain in doubt until the results are unsealed.
Perot’s edge may have as much to do with his presentation – and with Lamm’s – as any stranglehold he has over the mechanics. The two do occasionally differ. They part ways on trade, with Perot adamantly opposing NAFTA and GATT and Lamm supporting them (though Lamm is backing off that now by saying that negotiators should have better protected U.S. interests). But what really separates them is candor and style.
While Perot talks in folksy sound bites about making hard choices, the former Colorado governor actually makes them, specifically arguing that everyone from wealthy elderly to healthy veterans should give up some of their entitlements. His detailed plans take the movement for fiscal sanity to higher ground. But if Lamm wins points for prescribing tough medicine, his blunt bedside manner can make it hard to swallow. A spoonful of humor would help.
Then there’s the larger question: do voters, most of whom are doing fine economically, really want a pull-up-your-socks president? Other earnest, get-serious campaigns – including John Anderson’s in 1980 and Paul Tsongas’s in 1992 – have run aground. While Lamm’s friends respect his intelligence and guts, they are a bit wary of his passionate grandiosity. On one level, deficit hawks were exultant last week; they know that only the spotlight of a presidential race can put entitlements on the table. But some worried that a gaffe-filled performance by Lamm might ultimately set back the cause. Tsongas, for example, strongly praised Lamm – but said he would withhold a decision on endorsing him until after the Reform Party convention.
Whatever his fate, Lamm’s campaign is significant because he is the first major-league politician in recent years to make the leap to a third party. Should he capture the nomination, he would almost certainly be allowed to participate in this fall’s three presidential debates, where he would force Clinton and Dole to deal with issues – chiefly entitlements and campaign-finance reform – they would prefer to avoid. Lamm’s best hope is that younger Americans will wake up to their own economic interests and form the backbone of his campaign.
A Wisconsin native, army veteran, lawyer, CPA and most recently author and University of Denver professor, Lamm has always played the professorial maverick. As a freshman state legislator in 1967 he sponsored a bill that made Colorado the first state in the nation to legalize abortion. Later Lamm led the fight to keep the 1976 Olympics out of Colorado, an anti-growth movement that seems overwrought in retrospect. His popularity as governor from 1975 to 1987 stemmed from a pragmatic mix of social and environmental liberalism and fiscal conservatism.
But Lamm developed a reputation for sometimes sounding insensitive. In a 1983 speech, he said, ““Can we afford to spend more money trying to teach severely retarded children than we spend to educate our brightest children? We must ask ourselves: in a world of limited resources, does it make sense to spend $10,000 a year to educate a child to roll over?’’ Handicapped Coloradans sponsored a ““roll over’’ demonstration near the governor’s office. He antagonized Colorado Hispanics by advocating limits on legal immigration, a position he will emphasize in this campaign. ““I see no reason why the United States needs to become a nation of half a billion people,’’ he says, stressing that we should focus on ““our own huddled masses’’ over immigrants. By ‘92, his connection to Colorado voters had weakened, and he lost a Senate primary.
Lamm’s most notorious comment has been largely misunderstood. In 1984 he said, ““We’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.’’ Through the years, the ““duty to die’’ quote has been used to suggest he supports euthanasia, which he does not. But Lamm continues to make the basic point. A regular line in his speeches is that ““no other nation in the world would take a 90-year-old with congestive heart failure out of a nursing home and put him into an intensive-care unit.’'
Lamm’s candor is bold, bracing, and will probably doom him politically. Even if he were to win at Valley Forge, complex election regulations would make it difficult for Perot to underwrite a Lamm general-election bid, thus requiring Lamm to put some other millionaire on his ticket (New York businessman B. Thomas Golisano has been mentioned). Still, a Reform Party nomination fight may make it easier for the deficit hawks of the radical middle to prosper in the future. Dick Lamm likes to say he doesn’t know if the analogous year is 1856 or 1860 – if he’s John C. Fremont (the first, unsuccessful Republican candidate) or Abraham Lincoln. He might instead just be Ross Perot’s sacrificial lamb. But by stepping into the arena, Lamm is forcing substance – and a little life – into a sluggish campaign.
