Parenting & Family Quote by Ross Perot

A question like this smuggles values into the voting booth under the guise of common sense. Ross Perot isn’t asking you to compare platforms; he’s asking you to picture your child, your kitchen table, your private life, then let that intimacy do the political math. It’s a classic businessman’s move: bypass the abstract and run the decision through a gut-level “trust” metric, as if electing a president is a high-stakes hiring choice that can be solved with a character reference.

The genius, and the danger, is how it reframes legitimacy. “Which one…would you want your daughter to marry?” turns “candidate” into “man,” and “policy” into “personal decency.” It invites voters to treat public office as an extension of family life: the leader as son-in-law, the nation as household. That’s disarming, even cozy, and it flatters the listener as a moral evaluator rather than an ideological combatant.

The subtext carries a few barbs. It implies the field includes at least one guy you wouldn’t trust around your daughter; it nudges suspicion without having to accuse. It also leans on a paternal, gendered premise: the daughter as a measure of male virtue, the father as the gatekeeper. In Perot’s era, that resonated with swing voters exhausted by partisan spin and newly attentive to “character” after years of scandal politics. He’s selling a shortcut: forget the white papers, follow the protective instinct.