Perot jumped in for the last prez election before I could vote. I was… enchanted at first. Here’s this guy who is willing to talk numbers, with real charts and trends to back him up. Someone willing to park his butt behind a desk and talk about details to the whole country for a half hour. Someone willing to engage with the way I thought about the world. Someone willing to be skeptical about the national parties.

Then he dropped out of the race temporarily - still don’t understand why - and I looked back on all those things he’d said and realized that while he pointed out things which are problems, he never really said what he would do about them. So his argument boiled down to “I’m a smart guy, I’ll fix the intractable big-numbers problems.” And unstated but strongly implied was “no, I’m not going to raise [my own] taxes”. So I started cheering for Clinton, and maybe yelled at my mother when she admitted voting for Perot.

Strangely, Trump originally scanned to me as a less-impressive Perot figure when he showed up in 2015. I knew Trump was a birther, and engaged in a fairly public case of mutual loathing with Obama, so I never was going to vote for him. But I figured it wouldn’t be all that bad if he won, being a NY businessdude with some ambiguous political background and apparently reasonably successful at what he did. By the end of the primaries I knew better, of course…