During the presidency of George H. W. Bush, Perot became increasingly active in politics and strongly opposed the Gulf War and ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In 1992, Perot announced his intention to run for president and advocated a balanced budget, an end to the outsourcing of jobs, and the enactment of electronic direct democracy.

A June 1992 Gallup poll showed Perot leading a three-way race against President Bush and presumptive Democratic nominee Bill Clinton.

He quickly became a top employee (one year, he fulfilled his annual sales quota in two weeks)[16] and tried to pitch his ideas to supervisors, who largely ignored him.

[19] Perot gained some press attention for being "the biggest individual loser ever on the New York Stock Exchange" when his EDS shares dropped $445 million ($2.7 billion in today's money) in value in a single day in April 1970.

The stock's vulnerability was compounded by the fact that a significant portion of the publicly traded shares were "weakly held" by fast-performance mutual funds prone to rapid selling at the first sign of trouble.

[27] In 1986 this was turned into a two-part television mini-series (alternatively titled "Teheran") with the actor Burt Lancaster playing the role of Colonel Simons and Richard Crenna as Perot.

[31] After a visit to Laos in 1969, made at the request of the White House,[14] in which he met with senior North Vietnamese officials, Perot became heavily involved in the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue.

[32][33] In Florida in 1990, retired financial planner Jack Gargan, employing a famous quotation from the 1976 movie Network, funded a series of "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" newspaper advertisements denouncing Congress for voting to give legislators pay raises at a time when average wages nationwide were not increasing.

[36][37] On February 20, 1992, Perot appeared on CNN's Larry King Live and announced his intention to run as an independent if his supporters could get his name on the ballot in all 50 states.

[38] Perot denounced Congress for its inaction in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on March 18, 1992; he said: This city has become a town filled with sound bites, shell games, handlers, media stuntmen who posture, create images, talk, shoot off Roman candles, but don't ever accomplish anything.

With the insurgent candidacies of Republican Pat Buchanan and Democrat Jerry Brown winding down, Perot was the natural beneficiary of populist resentment toward establishment politicians.

[40] Several months before the Democratic and Republican conventions, Perot filled the vacuum of election news, as his supporters began petition drives to get him on the ballot in all 50 states.

This sense of momentum was reinforced when Perot employed two savvy campaign managers in Democrat Hamilton Jordan and Republican Ed Rollins.

Perot was late in making formal policy proposals, but most of what he did call for was intended to reduce the deficit, such as a fuel tax increase and cutbacks to Social Security.

Perot eventually stated the reason was that he received threats that digitally altered photographs would be released by the Bush campaign to sabotage his daughter's wedding.

Many of his supporters felt betrayed, and public opinion polls subsequently showed a largely negative view of Perot that was absent before his decision to end the campaign.

Our founders did not know about electricity, the train, telephones, radio, television, automobiles, airplanes, rockets, nuclear weapons, satellites, or space exploration.

[55] Unlike Perot, however, multiple third-party candidates since Roosevelt had won electoral college votes: Robert La Follette in 1924, Strom Thurmond in 1948, and George Wallace in 1968.

During the campaign, he had urged voters to listen for the "giant sucking sound" of American jobs heading south to Mexico should NAFTA be ratified.

On November 10, 1993, Perot debated with then-Vice President Al Gore on the issue on Larry King Live with an audience of 16 million viewers.

[67][68] In the 2000 presidential election, Perot refused to become openly involved with the internal Reform Party dispute between supporters of Pat Buchanan and John Hagelin.

Despite his earlier opposition to NAFTA, Perot remained largely silent about expanded use of guest-worker visas in the United States, with Buchanan supporters attributing this silence to his corporate reliance on foreign workers.

[69] In 2005, Perot was asked to testify before the Texas Legislature in support of proposals to extend access to technology to students, including making laptops available to them.

He supported changing the process of buying textbooks by making e-books available and by allowing schools to purchase books at the local level instead of going through the state.

[88] Perot also focused on anti-lobbying and political reform proposals - he favored a presidential line item veto against "pork barrel spending and waste", elimination of political action committees (PACs) to curb the influence of special interest groups, replacement of the Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Balanced Budget Act with a different balanced budget apparatus that would focus on limiting "tricks, loopholes, and improper accounting procedures" and a ban on exit polling during elections.

When asked about objections to his plans from free-market advocates, Perot said: "Don’t they realize that the biogenetics industry is the result of our federally funded research universities and the National Institutes of Health?

"In his 1993 book Not For Sale at Any Price,[91] Perot expressed support for giving tax cuts for small and medium-sized enterprises, as opposed to larger corporations.

It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car—have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south."

[94] Perot and his wife Margot (née Birmingham; born November 15, 1933),[95] a graduate of Goucher College, had five children (Ross Jr., Nancy, Suzanne, Carolyn, and Katherine)[6] and 19 grandchildren.