And so another Perotian was born. Fisher became a foot soldier in the blitzkrieg that has transformed presidential politics. Perot’s poll numbers dipped some last week–back into a statistical dead heat with George Bush and Bill Clinton–after a recent run of stories describing his zeal for investigations of perceived enemies, including Bush. But volunteers in Sandwich (population: 15,489) don’t buy into the “Inspector Perot” image. The grass-roots insurgency there and in 14 other towns strung along Cape Cod has been fueled by scores of C-Span epiphanies like Fisher’s. It’s also been nurtured by a distant but deft hand from Perot operatives in Dallas. They sorted through the crush of phone calls and letters triggered by Perot’s tele-democratic call to arms, sought out volunteers with the business and organizational skills to shepherd local petition drives and funneled names back to them. Armed with rosters of enlistees, local coordinators called meetings that spawned other meetings-in homes, libraries and hotel conference rooms.
One of those gatherings came on a rainy Sunday night in early April at The Dan’l Webster Inn in Sandwich. Fisher and many of the other 76 Cape Cod residents were invited by Larry Williams, a Chatham hotel-management consultant and longtime Perot admirer who heard about the petition drive while lying in bed watching the “Today” show on March 16. An energetic Republican campaign volunteer who specializes in corporate “team building,” Williams, 49, traces his lineage back to Benjamin Franklin. After " Today," he wrote Perot an impassioned letter likening his bid to the 70-year-old Franklin’s perilous Atlantic crossing to secure a French alliance in the Revolutionary War. “When destiny calls, you must be there, and thank God you are,” Williams wrote.
Others who came to The Dan’l Webster that night took different paths into Perot Country. John McInnis, 45, a probation officer and son of a Boston Democratic ward boss, says he’s lost faith that “the common good is still being considered by politicians.” He wrote to Perot in Dallas after seeing him on " Larry King Live" on Feb. 20. Also in the room was Libby Smith, a 32-year-old housewife who voted for Jerry Brown in the Massachusetts primary because he “wasn’t afraid to face the issues.” She called a appearance as well. So did Diane Vetromile, 47, a Brewster furniture designer and Pat Buchanan stalwart who thinks Bush is “a nice man who needs a nice long vacation.”
Cape Cod’s Perot supporters conform closely to the emerging national profile of the crew-cut Texan’s support: retirees and aging white baby boomers in fast-growing outer-rim suburbs like Sandwich, about 60 miles southeast of Boston. It’s a group that takes in Republicans but tends to be weighted toward independents and disaffected, Tsongas-style Democrats. That’s bad news for Bill Clinton in Massachusetts, a state that has been the closest thing to a lead-pipe cinch for Democratic presidential nominees. Perot voters’ concerns are economic, marked by deep anxieties about the deficit, government regulation, taxes and job prospects for their children. While Perot hasn’t spoken to these core issues with anything approaching Clinton’s specificity, that doesn’t trouble his followers here. Far more important is their sense of his personal strength and his independence of a two-party system they believe has lost its moral compass. Some regard his “let’s get the best people together to work on it” haziness as a virtue. “One thing that impresses me is that he says, ‘I don’t know yet’,” says Smith, who had her three young children (2, 6 and 7 years old) in tow when she collected petition signatures. “I wish other politicians would do that instead of pretending that they have all the answers.”
There’s also a dry-eyed unsentimentality in much of Perot’s support in Sandwich. Some who are ready to vote for him acknowledge misgivings. “He has the makings of a little bit of a fascist,” says Larry Lague, 50, a regional planner and independent voter. But Lague and others are ready to assume the risks inherent in unleashing a political Terminator to level a corrupt and gridlocked system. “To get people out of that stuck place,” he says. “Ross Perot is sort of their poison pill for the political process,” adds Boston pollster Brad Bannon. “They think if they send Perot to Washington he will destroy what’s left of the system either by accident or design.” The cape’s petition drive started slowly. Fisher deployed his Sandwich troops to what he thought were the best targets of opportunity: the two town supermarkets, the post office and a factory-outlet mall near the Cape Cod Canal’s Sagamore Bridge. Foul weekend weather in April, combined with Perot’s relative anonymity, made signatures difficult to get. But as his video presence grew, so did interest. Volunteers circulated videocassettes of Perot’s campaign appearances like his National Press Club speech and hit the local radio talk shows and got friendly with the town clerks who would legally certify the signatures they were gathering. They distributed newsletters with the latest word on “Mr. Perot” and phone numbers for those interested in getting involved. One issue of Larry Williams’s Root Connector coached volunteers on talking with reporters: " Show your enthusiasm; speak for yourself; avoid ‘bashing.’ Remember, it’s not a ‘campaign’ and Mr. Perot is not a’ candidate.’ It’s a signature drive." Only once did the Perot drive hit a serious bump. The petition effort in the gay and lesbian stronghold of Provincetown stalled after Perot said he would not hire acknowledged homosexuals for certain top administrative positions.
The Massachusetts movement may have been from the grass roots, but Dallas kept a watchful eye. It dispatched a 29-year-old field representative, Brokaw Price, as a liaison to volunteers in several Northeastern states. Price was hardly a seasoned pro: his last job was selling long-distance phone service for a Dallas telecommunications firm. Still, he carried Perot’s proxy on nearly 20 trips to Boston to advise Williams and other members of the state steering committee on federal election laws, scheduling and security measures for the petitions (they were photocopied and placed in a local bank’s safe-deposit box). While locals boasted of their autonomy, no detail was too small for the scrutiny of Perot’s central command. When volunteer Noel Tipton, a 60-year-old Eastham musician, started to recruit professional singers to perform a piece he composed for a June 20 rally on Boston Common, Dallas nixed the plan, insisting that the voices had to be those of amateur Perot boosters.
By late June, Sandwich volunteers had gathered 2,000 signatures. The campaign says it gathered nearly 100,000 statewide, 10 times the legal requirement in Massachusetts, now one of 19 states so far where Perot will be on the November ballot. But Sandwich’s volunteers sense that the easy part is behind them–that holding their coalition together through the summer and fall will take a lot more than soldiering through shopping malls chasing signatures. They also know that campaign manager Ed Rollins is assembling a network of hired guns to parallel the amateurs. “We have to start doing something other than petition drives,” Perot press secretary James Squires said last week. Regardless of what happens in the fall, some in Sandwich say the last 90 days has made polities a little less distant, a little more real. “Maybe other things are possible,” says Libby Smith. “It’s just encouraging to see that if people are thinking along the same lines that something can get done.”
