Perot was a hoot to watch with his charts and graphs, and his "tinker under the hood" and "giant sucking sound" comments.  But, in the end, he was just too nuts to carry the election.  He was a gaffe machine throughout the election including referring to blacks as "you people" at an event.  The guy spent millions to buy time on the major networks where he made his case using these charts and graphs to talk about the economy and what he'd do to fix the deficit.  At one point before dropping out of the race, he was actually polling as the frontrunner. 

 

It turned out the only reason he really got into the race was to assure that Bush lost the election.  He had a personal beef with the Bush family going back decades, so he made it his mission to undermine #41, and he did enough to split the vote in the election to swing it to Clinton.  When it was revealed that he'd paid someone to privately investigate the Bush family, it was one factor in why he dropped out of the race before getting back in later.  Perot got almost 20% of the vote in the general election, taking almost all of that from Bush, who ran just a horrid campaign in 1992. 

 

The interesting thing about his campaign was the fact that he really didn't do the traditional campaigning.  He did a few rallies, but he would only attend them if it was only his supporters in the audience, so he didn't hit the campaign trail and do the kind of grass roots campaigning most politicians do when running for office.  He felt more comfortable doing interviews, and doing his little infomercials, and it certainly got him a lot of attention.

 

He kept the debates entertaining.  Unfortunately, his running mate was just awful in his only debate, leaning heavily on his experience in running the Vietnam war which probably wasn't the wisest approach to take considering how unpopular that war was. It's tough to make Dan Quayle look more competent, but Stockdale managed to accomplish that feat. 

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