Perot’s brand of plainspoken populism—he vowed to “get under the hood” and fix the American economy—would find an echo in political candidates as diverse as Sarah Palin and Trump himself, and his anti-establishment distrust of Big Government in Washington was the same spirit that animated Tea Party conservatives a political generation later. He was so ubiquitous a pop-culture presence that Dana Carvey of Saturday Night Live was forced to do double duty, offering dead-on impressions of Perot and Bush.

Perot, a pint-size Texan (he stood just 5 feet 5 inches), made his fortune in data processing. He signaled his willingness to run on King’s prime-time CNN show on February 20, 1992, challenging supporters to get him on the ballot in all 50 states. “We’re the owners of this country,” he declared. “We don’t act like the owners. We act like white rabbits that get programmed by messages coming out of Washington.”

His platform offered an eclectic mix of airy themes and concrete proposals. He called for balancing the federal budget, stepping up the War on Drugs, promoting economic nationalism, and creating “electronic town halls” to foster town-meeting-style direct democracy. By spring, he was leading in the polls in both Texas and California, and striking fear into the hearts of both the Bush and Clinton campaigns. No less a loyal Democrat than Mario Cuomo allowed of Perot, “I have no negatives to say about him,” and summed up public dissatisfaction with government this way: “We’re not happy with the Democrats, because you’re in Congress and you didn’t do it. We’re not happy with the Republicans, because you were president and you didn’t do it. Unless the Democrats and the Republicans answer that challenge, Perot will be president.”

But Perot proved a wildly uneven and unpredictable campaigner, repeatedly rejecting the counsel of his own paid advisers and stirring controversies with a wide range of groups, from the NAACP to AIDS activists. In July, with his poll numbers slipping, he dropped out of the race, saying he feared his presence could throw the election into the House of Representatives.

Still, Perot left his name on the ballot, and in October he suddenly resumed active campaigning, claiming that he had dropped out initially because of rumors that Republican operatives had planned to disrupt his daughter’s wedding; he floated suggestions of a wiretapping plot against him and his business. Bush’s White House press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, dismissed the allegations as “loony” and the president himself called them “crazy,” leading Perot to adopt Willie Nelson’s mournful country ballad in defiance. “There are millions of crazy people in this country,” he told his supporters in the campaign’s waning hours, “and I’ll say tomorrow, I bet it’ll be a crazy day at the polls.”