As the political world debates the meaning of a Bloomberg candidacy — my own take will appear in the New York Post tomorrow morning — one important piece of mythology about the recent past needs to be cleared up. Ross Perot’s 1992 bid for the presidency did not hurt Republicans and Democrats equally — it was a nuclear weapon aimed at George H.W. Bush’s second term and it scored a direct hit. There is irrefutable proof of this in one of the most important works of political science published in the last decade — Three’s a Crowd by Walter Stone and Ross Rapaport. They demonstrate unquestionably that Perot took the lion’s share of his 19 percent chunk out of Bush’s hide, and did lesser but still meaningful damage to Bob Dole in 1996.

I don’t know if Bush would have been reelected in 1992 if Perot hadn’t run, but Perot did have a distorting effect on the meaning of that election — mostly in confusing Bill Clinton about a non-existent leftward shift in the polity that left the new president open to making the colossal mistake on health care. That mistake, which effectively pushed Southern and Southwestern swing voters firmly into the Republican camp, had consequences that harmed Democrats in six subsequent elections. Not until 2006 did the Dems find their sea legs again.