He wasn’t just a flake, he was a coward. When Pee-rot found himself at first place in the polls, he quit (before jumping back in to stay in 3rd). He didn’t want to win, he just wanted to assure a Republican wouldn’t... twice in a row.
After Clinton assumed office, Perot was giving a speech in his usual lecturing the masses style. Then he said,
“Now I know a lot of you people think that I elected Bill Clinton...”
The crowd erupted in a hostile roar. Perot blanched with fright and his flunkies quickly hustled him off the podium.
Like Ceaucescu the day of his last speech.
I agree Perot did not run a campaign effectively. But in those earlier days, I don’t think he or most other outside-the-Beltway types understood the depths of dirty tricks that originated from inside the Beltway. The threats against his daughter must have been very unsettling. It’s easy to blame him personally for being the tipping point when the system we cherished up until that time — schoolchildren were taught that everyone had a shot at rising up in life and even running for president (at least if you were a male) — was no longer going to be viable. I think Perot still believed that the Nixon dirty tricks were an aberration, and that he could be a reformer. The Roosevelts and Kennedys started the involvement of union and foreign money, but Poppy Bush made dirty tricks into an art form and the Clintons were only too happy to institutionalize both types of corruption into a permanent cynical contempt for the entire concept of “the consent of the governed.”