What happened to Dan Quayle, George W. Bush’s Vice President? He ran in the 1996 and 2000 primaries and lost badly in each. Where is he now?
He was kind of a fundamentalist fellow, kind of a far right Christian. He is probably a lawyer in Indianapolis or something. Outside of Indiana, he is probably not welcomed in Republican gatherings. Well, he’s rich I guess.
Where is Dan???
Grady
I think he was born that way.
He is involved as a trustee of Freedom House, a non-partisan organisation campaigning for democracy which was co-founded by Eleanor Roosevelt. I’m not sure how much of his time that takes up.
Other than that, nobody seems to know. Even the official biographies end with his failed 2000 Presidential bid. He wrote or edited a number of books in the 1980s and 1990s, but Amazon doesn’t have anything recent. If you want more information, you could try his agency for public speaking appearances, but their bio is equally sparse.
His only public pronouncement since 2000 came in 2002 when he spoke out in support of TV show The Osbournes.
That’d be George H. W. Bush, aka Poppy, aka Pere Bush, aka Daddy, aka George I. Unless I’m being whooshed again.
His brain was surgically removed by a secret team of Livermore Labs scientists and placed in the body of a brain-dead Presidential candidate who choked on a pretzel during the 2000 campaign.
Quayle’s original head was secretly removed and cast in bronze, where it sits in the Senate wing of the US Capitol. The two chief scientists on the project were commissioned as “sculptors” and liquidated to ensure their silence.
Ah, the good ol’ days of Mr. Potatoe Head. The guy was always good for a laugh until you remembered with sudden chilling clarity that he was only a sniper’s bullet away from the oval office.
Dan changed his name to Quayl in hopes of being a spelling be judge again. Sorry, spelling bee.
I think the potato incident was unfair. Quayle was reading from an improperly printed flashcard that had potato spelled “potatoe.” NOW everbody knows that potato–singular–has no “e” on the end, but before that day in the school, I think it was easy to to take the flashcard at face value because there’s an “e” after the “o” in “potatoes.”
I think the potato incident was unfair. Quayl was reading from an improperly printed flashcard that had potato spelled “potatoe.” NOW everybody knows that potato–singular–has no “e” on the end, but before that day in the school, I think it was easy to take the flashcard at face value because there’s an “e” after the “o” in “potatoes.”
('Sorry–I had to add a “y” and omit the extraneous “to.” I know how particular people are on this site.)
As I understand the potatoe incident, the card was not “improperly printed”, but rather delierately printed with a spelling error to see if the testee would recognize the misspelling. Quayle blithely assumed the words on the cards were correctly spelled rather than asking someone about them.
I don’t remember Quayle being either a fundamentalist Christian or on the “far right”, politically. He was pretty mainstream as a Christian and a Republican. He wrote an introduction to the anthology On Faith and Free Government, asserting his belief in the separation of church and state.
Meanwhile:
Candice Bergen agrees with Quayle.
I really hesitate to post this, because it could easily provoke a GD hijack. But in the interests of “factuality”:
Walloon, did you google for that reference, or were you looking for it? Because the Media Research Center is not some centrist, apolitical journalistic research organisation. Their mission statement is to be “The Leader in Documenting, Exposing and Neutralizing Liberal Media Bias” They aren’t the most credible organization to use as a cite to refute the suggestion that Quayle is right-wing. In fact, given their mission, their implied endorsement of Quayle could be taken as confirmation of Quayle’s conservative credentials. (“Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”)
I seem to recall reading he lives in Arizona.
I actually met the man once, while he was veep.
I do not share his politics, but he was completely erudite and charming. I can say (empirically, in my own judgement) that Dan Q is very sharp and engaging, and NOT stupid. I think he got a bad rap. I did not vote for him.
Folks, you don’t get that high on the ladder without some social skills and some clout.
LBJ had both, Cheney has both, Gore has both. Just not ENOUGH to get to the top rung without someone else’s intervention. Okay, Mondale had neither. He is the exception to the rule.
Quayle, unlike many other presidents and candidates we can think of, made it into politics pretty much on his own. His family ran a local newspaper, and he went to average schools. He has a degree in Political Science, and also a law degree.
He was elected to Congress at age 29, beating an incumbent. Won re-election in the biggest landslide his district had ever seen, and then won a Senate seat against an incumbent. Won re-election in the biggest landslide the state had ever seen. Once in the Senate, he rocketed to the top of the heap, winning seats on many of the most powerful committees, and co-drafting a veyr large education bill in partnership with Ted Kennedy.
At this point, NO ONE thought Quayle was stupid. He was a very popular politician, and respected on both sides of the aisle. After all, Bush picked the guy for a reason.
When Quayle joined the ticket, the Democrats made the decision that he was most vulnerable to the charge of ‘youth and inexperience’. Quayle then uttered a couple of gaffes like the ‘potatoe’ thing, and the meme stuck. And once the media label someone, they follow them constantly looking for evidence to back up the label.
Btw, from what I understand, Quayle is now working with some investment company.
I once had a very liberal PolySci teacher who did agree that Dan Quayle was one of the most unfairly labeled men in history.