Two of the worst Vice Presidents are Dick Cheney and Dan Quayle.
Dan Quayle is an idiot who was the deserved butt of jokes by late night tv hosts. However, Dick Cheney is an immoral man with a lust for power and will stop at nothing to achieve it. Quayle added nothing to George H. W. Bush’s presidency while Cheney is largely believed to shape Bush’s policy. Quayle was busy ridiculing tv mothers while Cheney was busy releasing the names of CIA agents and having secret meetings with energy companies.
Still, President Quayle would have been an absolute nightmare for this country. We already have a de facto President Cheney.
For all his ineptitude at speaking and presenting himself, Quayle was a reasonable and fairly innocuous man. A Quayle Presidency would likely have been brief, uneventful, and forgettable. He would have pretty much made whatever political decision seemed safest, played the political winds, and been quietly shuffled out of office in a Bill Clinton landslide. You’d remember him exactly the way people remember Gerald Ford except without the smelly pardon thing.
Cheney’s administration has been a disaster, and would have been worse if he’d actually been President as opposed to just influencing Bush. Cheney will leave his country isolated and mired in an unwinnable war, with billions of its taxpayers’ dollars stolen by himself and his cronies. He’s been a hundred times worse than Quayle could ever have been.
Quayle was a doofus and a bumbler, but meant well. Cheney is a vicious warmongerer who exploits his position to give power to large corporations and to expand empire while waging war on the middle class. Seems clear to me.
Say all you want about Cheney, except that he is a bad VP. He has pushed the White House agenda very effectively for 6 years. You may disagree with that agenda but he has been instrumental in getting the American to buy it with his selective appearences on Sunday news shows.
I’ve never seen a Vice President so willing to tell such blatant lies even when presented with irrefutable evidence of his own words. I think he has to have some sort of personality disorder that would allow him to do that. Very unethical man. Dan Quayle was a fairly harmless doofus. Spiro Agnew was corrupt, but neither as bright nor as sick as Cheney.
I dunno, I never thought Quayle was especially dumb; he was just a particularly inept public speaker with an unfortunate tendency to get linked with pointless issues that encouraged Republic chest-beating, like Murphy Brown’s child. He was mostly harmless.
Why should we not say that? When people discuss whether a politician is good or bad, they are usually referring to the effect on the realm, not how effective he is in pushing his agenda. Cheney is hideously effective, to be sure.
Cheney may be effective, but I don’t think it’s his job to develop his own agenda and ram it through the president and congress. I want my veeps in the loop so they can take over in the event of the president’s death, they can be part of the team, but they shouldn’t be pushing their own agenda.
I think Quayle was nowhere near as dumb as he was portrayed. He seemed to me to be a good and decent person, perhaps he would have been a somewhat timid president but he certainly didn’t do the country any harm while in office.
“I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change.”
and
“The future will be better tomorrow”.
Quayle is perceived as harmless because he did not have a forceful role in the Administration and because he was a hilarious verbal bumbler. What’s forgotten is his far-right beliefs that led to his being selected as a veep candidate to appease more extreme elements of the party. The thought of him becoming president is horrific.
It’s part of the mantra of the Left that Cheney is the real power in Washington and leading Bush around by the nose. I’m sure that Bush has benefited greatly from being underestimated in this way.