In 1992, for the first time since serious polling began, a third party candidate led BOTH national party candidates for the November election. His issue was the exploding national debt and his name was Ross Perot.

Our media selects spokesmen who have no sense of history whatsoever, so nobody has mentioned Perot’s obvious parallel to Sara Palin. Perot was an instant national sensation when Larry King asked him if he was willing to be president and he said yes.

To me, Perot’s leap to the top of the polls was what it really was, a historical first. Even George Wallace had only gotten within striking distance behind a hopelessly trailing Democrat in 1968. At one point it was Wallace 21%, Humphrey 29%, and Nixon stayed at 41 to 43 percent the whole time.

This was a historical first. But Perot went right out of range of both of them. It was a historical phenomenon.

Then Perot said his enemies had threatened to disrupt his daughter’s wedding and he withdrew. Having proved himself a cukoo, his attempt to get back in the race was fatally damaged, but he still got a lot more votes than anyone in the Political Science Department at South Carolina, where I went back to grad school for a semester, had thought he would.

Except me.

In 1992 even a proven fruitcake could do well in a match up between the kind of respectable conservative/liberal match up that the system regularly produces.

Perot’s breakdown and breakup was a relief to both liberals and conservatives. They have an industry going very smoothly which gives them all money and fame, and it is in solid, long-term balance, as any routine business needs to be.

I am unique in looking at it as what it is, a smooth-running industry. In this industry respectable conservatives compete with others to be most acceptable to the liberals and at the same time make the yokels think they are some kind of dreaded “Opposition.”

On most issues respectable conservative offer “opposition” until liberals declare that any further opposition is “extremist,” and then every respectable denounces anyone who takes the wrong side on that issue after that.

Respectable conservatives are the loudest in denouncing such “extremists,” since those “extremists” are the people who are aspiring to take THEIR place as the “opposition.”

Respectable conservatives get paid to protect present polities from being attacked at the root. Respectable conservatives, for example, are hailed as the Opposition on the issue of illegal immigration, but they are the first to denounce anyone who challenges the whole “nation of immigrants” crap, which dooms all effective immigration enforcement from the start.

But the national debt issue is a constant problem. Even the yokels can’t ignore numbers that are up on billboards. So that is an issue that breaks through the respectable conservative barrier from time to time, making a Perot or a Sara Palin big stuff for a while.

The national debt issue allowed to Newt Gingrich to make a political revolution in 1994, too. Clinton made him close down the government and whipped him.

Now we have Sara Palin.