"It is especially amusing to hear progressives, the principal creators of the watery Caesarism of today’s presidency, sorrowfully describing Trump’s ballroom..."

"... as discordant with the White House’s proper modesty. They should worry less about the president’s residential immodesty and more about his anti-constitutional immodesty.

Writes George Will, in "The choreographed fakery of American politics: East Wing edition/Trump’s residential immodesty is nothing compared with his anti-constitutional immodesty" (WaPo).

I wondered if anyone had written "watery Caesarism" before. It sounds like a bad salad. A real salad, not a word salad. Don't put the dressing on until you're about to eat it. Anyway, "watery Caesarism" did turn up on a few old web pages, but — are you surprised? — they're all written by George Will!

1992: "Trouble is, most presidents are mediocre.

"Would a third party candidate named Trump or Reagan have instant appeal with Republicans?"

Asks Paul Begala, in "RFK Jr.’s VP pick is a missile aimed at Biden" (CNN).

And: "As a former Clinton strategist, the dumbest myth I’ve had to deal with was that Ross Perot’s independent candidacy swung the 1992 election to Clinton. To believe that, one must ignore that Perot, like Clinton, was a change candidate; like Clinton, he was pro-choice, and like Clinton, Perot supported campaign finance reform."

Of course, Begala wants to believe that Clinton would have beaten Bush I in a 2-man race.

"After causing a lot of #covfefe..."

After causing a lot of #covfefe, Howard Schultz has decided not to run in 2020. Maybe he can now get back to drawing some new Charlie Brown cartoons! https://t.co/wXPF7IqTZM

— Donald J. Drumpf (@RealDonalDrumpf) September 6, 2019

Ha ha.

Anyway... I assume Howard Schultz can jump back in whenever he wants. Maybe wait and see who's the nominee and so forth. You can be out and get back in. That's what Ross Perot did.

ADDED: Here's Schultz's public presentation of his reasoning:

First... the exhausted majority has largely tuned out of political life online and in the news, leaving the extreme voices to define the debate. In addition, not enough people today are willing to consider backing an independent candidate because they fear doing so might lead to re-electing a uniquely dangerous incumbent president. There is considerable concern that four more years of a Trump administration pose a graver threat to our democracy than four more years of political dysfunction. I agree, but I’m also concerned that far-left policy ideas being advanced by several Democratic candidates will further alienate voters who believe those ideas will inflict more economic harm than good. The nomination of a far-left Democratic candidate could result in more votes for Trump—unless a moderate independent is also on the ballot.

I'm reading this after what I wrote above, and it reinforces my sense that he's ready to jump back in if the nominee is too left wing.

Unfortunately, election rules in each state and the way this Democratic nomination process has unfolded pose another challenge: It has become more likely that the Democratic nominee will not be known before the deadlines to submit the required number of signatures for an independent to get on the ballot.  If I went forward, there is a risk that my name would appear on ballots even if a moderate Democrat wins the nomination, and that is not a risk I am willing to take.

Perot was on the ballot in all 50 states, but Schultz is saying he doesn't want to be on the ballot if a non-lefty Democrat is the nominee.

"Forbes ranked Perot's self-made quotient as a full-fledged 10. That's because he started his empire on his 32nd birthday as a one-man operation financed with $1,000 borrowed from Margot."

"Perot came up with the name Electronic Data Systems while attending Sunday service at Highland Park Presbyterian Church, where he and Margot have been members since moving to Dallas in 1957. He scribbled it down on the back of a pledge envelope. Perot became a multimillionaire when he took EDS public in 1968. In a 2018 interview, Perot Jr. described the family's dinner the night before the company's IPO. 'Dad said, "Now tomorrow, we're going to take EDS public, and a lot of people are going to write about the money that we have. But remember, none of this is important. The only thing that's important is our family and how we take care and respect our family. That's the first time we ever had a money conversation in the family. Then we watched Dad become the Bill Gates of the '60s. As I tell the children, Fortune said he was "the fastest, richest Texan ever."'"

From "Ross Perot, self-made billionaire, patriot and philanthropist, dies at 89" (Dallas News).

"What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama — yet again—a central part of our own politics?"

Wrote the late Christopher Hitchens in January 2008, quoted in this morning's NYT in a review of a new collection of some of his essays. (The book is "And Yet...") From the review:

It’s a shame Mr. Hitchens isn’t here to comment on Donald Trump’s political moment. He saw in the ideas behind Ross Perot’s candidacy some of what he might have distrusted in Mr. Trump’s, that is the idea that “government should give way to management.”...

Yes, "management" — I was just saying that's Trump's "stock one-word answer to queries about how he'll do something he says he will do." So I dug up the old Hitchens essay. Here. It's in The Wilson Quarterly. The Wilson Quarterly? Egad. Woodrow Wilson. That name is mud this week. And the Hitchens essay is "Bring on the Mud/Mud-slinging in politics is a time-honored American tradition. But is there anything so bad about throwing a few political barbs?" It's not mostly about government as management, and the whole thing is on such a high level that I want to weep for our loss:

When asked, millions of people will say that the two parties are (a) so much alike as to be virtually indistinguishable, and (b) too much occupied in partisan warfare. The two “perceptions” are not necessarily opposed: Party conflict could easily be more and more disagreement about less and less—what Sigmund Freud characterized in another context as “the narcissism of the small difference.” For a while, about a decade ago, the combination of those two large, vague impressions gave rise to the existence of a quasi-plausible third party, led by Ross Perot, which argued, in effect, that politics should be above politics, and that government should give way to management. That illusion, like the touching belief that one party is always better than the other, is compounded of near-equal parts naiveté and cynicism.

By the way, the phrase "his name is mud" goes back to 1823:

1823   ‘J. Bee’ Slang 122   Mud, a stupid twaddling fellow. ‘And his name is mud!’ ejaculated upon the conclusion of a silly oration, or of a leader in the Courier.

But some people like to tie the phrase to Samuel Mudd, the doctor who treated the leg John Wilkes Booth broke. Whether Booth broke the leg when he jumped onto the stage in Ford's Theatre is a separate question and one question too many for this post of many questions.

"We’ve been to this corner of Crazytown before. If we’re going to have a billionaire dope running for the presidency..."

"... I prefer Ross Perot and his cracked tales of Vietnamese hit squads dispatched to take him out while Lee Atwater plotted to crash his daughter’s wedding with phonied-up lesbian sex pictures."

From "Witless Ape Rides Escalator," by Kevin D. Williamson, and that's more than I want to have to say about the person whose name I'm again declining to blog... which is what last night's post meant. I'm not saying his name. I'm not giving him the attention he wants. As my mother used to say: You'll only encourage him.

UPDATE: Originally this post had only one tag: nothing.

"If Newt Is Perot..."

"... then Romney should avoid being Bush."

Obama defended with an argument that was used many years ago — lamely — to defend Ross Perot.

Oh, how I fulminated in 1992, when Ross Perot was challenged for not having women in his inner circle of advisors and he said:

But in terms of being influenced by women and being a minority, there they are right out there, my wife and my 4 beautiful daughters, and I just have 1 son, so he and I are surrounded by women, giving -- telling us what to do all the time.

My son John remembers, because we've watched the great documentary "The War Room" together many times, and when that part comes up, I've always gone into my rant that looks a lot like the rant I did over the new Ron Suskind book about Obama's inner circle when Anita Dunn tried to roll back her attack on Obama for the lack of women in his inner circle by saying "The president is someone who when he goes home at night he goes home to house full of very strong women... He values having strong women around him."

Who am I? Why am I not here?

James Stockdale, Perot's running mate in 1992, has died. He employed an unforgettable, offbeat style in the Vice Presidential debate, which will live forever in Saturday Night Live reruns, where his impersonator, Phil Hartman, is also immortal.