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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

Something about your comment makes me compare and contrast with the oddball outsider who did make it into the White House - the current occupant.

At the time there were many people who cursed Perot for splitting the two party vote, however he did get 18.9% and that is pretty incredible considering how entrenched attitudes were at the time for voting Democrat to make sure the Republican didn't win and vice-versa.

I have watched Perot's political adverts from the era and I thought he was a breath of fresh air. If I was American and of voting age at the time I like to think I would have voted for him and not succumbed to the peer pressure to vote Democrat.

Even the idea of a third party candidate was ahead of its time. Ralph Nader must have been informed by the success of Perot.

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The one ad I remember mocked our government for "wasting" money studying "gas emissions" from cows. Of course, the question of agricultural methane production is quite important from the standpoint of total greenhouse gas emissions, and there has been interesting research towards reducing methane emissions while maintaining production. It's also a negligible part of the budget, like almost all scientific spending. I was 13 years old and thinking, how stupid, is this guy saying he's going to go through picking and choosing these tiny little line items in the budget based on how they sound?

From a larger perspective, it shows that even sophisticated businessmen fall victim to the usual fallacies about government spending, thinking that there's a lot more waste that can be easily trimmed than there is, that you can cut a few unpopular programs and make a reduction in taxes or balance the budget, or that a national government should be run like a household, putting off spending when revenue is low and cranking it up while it is high.

That's not a fallacy he fell victim to, that was campaigning and electioneering. It was hot on the tail of a big news expose about $600+ toilet seats and $40 bolts that the pentagon was buying. Plus America was starting to accelerate the the transformation in to a services and information based economy and we not just knew but were planning on sending manufacturing to Latin America. That waste had real resonance with workers and a lot of other folks at the time. "They're sending car manufacturing jobs to Mexico and the eggheads are studying cow farts.. (with some giant sounding number of dollars)" They still do this, you don't have to google far to find criticism over how much it cost for the Obamas to vacation in Hawaii or what the secret service spends at Mar-a-Lago.

Now there was no way Ross was going to go through the budget and pick out the crappy wasteful things, but that message had legs. Enough such that congress doesn't do a budget anymore...

Hmm? America has had nominally serious third party candidates for the presidency regularly since the emergence of today’s two major parties 150 years ago.

Heck, the GOP itself began as an ultimately successful third party challenge.

Even the idea of a third party candidate was ahead of its time.

That time being 1832? Or any other election after which a third party candidate had an influence over the outcome?

The current incumbent isn't really Republican, he was a Democrat supporter until recently, has never held elected office and ran on the Republican ticket just because he had the money to do so. He is a genuine outsider.

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