H. Ross Perot, the feisty Texas technology billionaire who rattled US politics with two independent presidential campaigns in the 1990s that struck a chord with disgruntled voters, died on Tuesday at the age of 89, his family said.

“Ross Perot, the ground-breaking businessman and loving husband, brother, father and grandfather, passed away early Tuesday at his home in Dallas, surrounded by his devoted family,” the Perot family said in a statement. A family spokesman said leukemia was the cause of death.

Perot’s fortune was estimated at $4.1 billion by Forbes magazine in April 2019.

Perot was a natural salesman who made a fortune in computer services but he was an unlikely and unconventional politician. He was short with buzz-top haircut, spoke with a folksy Texas drawl and had protruding ears that even he joked about. He was blunt and assertive and his success in business made him accustomed to getting his way.

Perot leaped into the 1992 presidential race as an independent and quickly found a lode of Americans turned off by the Republican and Democratic parties. His overarching issue was curbing the government’s deficit spending — an issue he referred to as the “crazy aunt in the basement” who no one wanted to talk about.

His outsider campaign, much of it financed by his own money, featured 30-minute television “infomercials”. With his charts, self-deprecating humour and down-home economic remedies, Perot led a Gallup Poll five months before the election with 39 per cent, compared to 31

per cent for incumbent Republican George H.W. Bush and 25 per cent for Democrat Bill Clinton.

A month later, however, Perot stunned the political world by withdrawing from the race. He re-entered several weeks later saying he had dropped out because Republican tricksters had been plotting to disrupt his daughter’s wedding.

Perot finished with a respectable 19 per cent of the vote in the presidential election, trailing Clinton’s 43 per cent and Bush’s 37.5 per cent.

Perot stayed active in politics by speaking out against the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it would create a “giant sucking sound” of American jobs going to Mexico.

For his 1996 White House run, Perot started the Reform Party but captured little more than eight per cent of the popular vote, as well as causing a rift in the political movement he founded.

Many voters said they had come to perceive Perot as overbearing, volatile, paranoid and egotistical — even if they had liked his ideas. By 2000, Perot had mostly faded from the national political radar.

Henry Ross Perot was born on June 27, 1930, in Texarkana, Texas, and raised in the height of the Depression. He graduated in 1953 from the US Naval Academy, where he first learned about computers.

After his naval service, Perot joined IBM as a computer salesman in 1957 and quickly made a reputation for himself. In 1962 he met his yearly sales quota by Jan 19.

Disenchanted that his bosses did not like his ideas, Perot started his own company, Electronic Data Systems Inc in Dallas, a move that would make him a billionaire by age 38 by handling data processing for customers such as the Medicare system, Nasa and other government entities.

Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2019