H. Ross Perot was many things back in the '90s -- wealthy businessman with a penchant for charts and conspiracy theories, insistent prophet warning of fiscal ruin, two-time presidential candidate, and the basis for one of Dana Carvey's best impersonations on Saturday Night Live -- but one thing he was not was a libertarian.
Which made it surprising to hear Perot described this way from someone who should know better, reporter Katy Tur, who's covering the Trump campaign for NBC.
Tur appeared yesterday on Bloomberg TV's With All Due Respect (which MSNBC airs an hour later at 6 p.m.) with co-hosts Mark Halperin and John Heilemann to discuss Trump's lashing out at the media and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol urging David French, a lawyer, decorated Iraq war veteran and writer for National Review, to run an independent campaign for president to give Republicans an alternative to Trump.
After Tur downplayed French's potential to alter the race, Heilemann asked whether the Libertarian Party ticket of ex-GOP governors Gary Johnson and William Weld could pose a problem for Trump --
HEILEMANN: Let me ask you this question, though, because Trump was basically, he reacted to Kristol over the weekend on Twitter and he said other things today that suggested, you know, a serious, what he said in the press conference today, if you had a serious or a decent third-party candidate on the right, that he would lose on the basis of that. So why doesn't that, why doesn't he look at the Libertarian ticket as being that? Why is the Libertarian ticket not a huge problem for him given that those are the people, if they draw any votes, they'll draw them away from Trump but not from Hillary Clinton.
TUR: I'm not sure. Maybe he just hasn't had that much exposure to the Libertarian ticket, he doesn't really understand what it could potentially take away, although if you look at the convention over the weekend, I mean, it's hard to take the the libertarian candidates seriously in some ways 'cause their convention becomes such a side show. And the reality is, a libertarian candidate, as you guys well know, hasn't really been that important since Ross Perot.
HEILEMANN (or was it Halperin? Both off camera): Right.
More accurately, Perot ran as the Reform Party's candidate for president in 1996 after he was instrumental in creating the party a year earlier, following his quixotic candidacy in 1992 when he ran as an independent without party affiliation.
In case you're wondering, the Libertarian Party's nominees for president during that period were Andre Marrou in 1992 and Harry Browne in 1996. Perot received nearly 19 percent of the vote in 1992 but won no states and hence no electoral votes. Four years later as the Reform Party nominee, Perot tallied only 8 percent of the vote and again, no states.
Hard to say for certain whether Halperin and Heilemann also thought Perot ran as a libertarian -- neither corrected Tur after she said it, nor did they later in the show -- or whether they refrained from pointing out her error to avoid embarrassing Tur. As veteran political observers and co-authors of two gossipy, post-election accounts of the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, their knowledge of campaign history presumably extends beyond the past few cycles.
