When you look up the phrase “deer caught in the headlights” in the dictionary, there is a picture of Dan Quayle right after hearing Lloyd Bentsen’s JFK line.
This thread reminds me of a now-outdated joke that I thought was hi-larious in the early 90s:
Q: What do Marion Barry and Marilyn Quayle have in common?
A: They both occasionally blow a little dope.
FWIW the Washington Post at the times sums it up:
Bush Picks Quayle, `Man of the Future,’ as Running Mate; Senator Selected In Effort to Woo Younger Voters
| Date: 8/17/1988 | Author: David Hoffman
The Washington Post
*
Vice President Bush, reaching out to “a young man born in the middle of this century and from the middle of this country,” today selected Sen. Dan Quayle (R-Ind.) as his 1988 running mate.
The surprise choice signaled a bid for support from a new generation of voters and an effort to shore up the Republican ticket in the troubled Midwest.
Abandoning his original plan to keep his choice secret until the last day of the Republican National Convention, Bush announced the decision amid a frenzy … *
You can read their first presser together here. Bush cites his youth, shared values and him being a midwesterner. And I think those, along with and echoing the reasons already given, were in fact partial reasons: Quayle was young (it is easy to forget now- esp. since he’s still kicking but Bush was at the time going to be the second oldest President Inaugurated in the 20th Century and was the 4th oldest ever), Midwesterner (the Midwest was entering a post-industrial and post-family farm adjustment period that would continue to accelerate over the next decade or so and that was a potential danger battleground for the GOP) and the shared values blah-blah means DQ is conservative
And that is why Bush picked him. Bush believed the vice-presidency was the way to the presidency and he set up who he thought was the best man to continue the Rebublican dominance in the presidential office after his own eight years.
I will have you know that when I lived in Virginia, the Southest state of all, based on SNOTTINESS, not the more-arbitrary measurements, “y’all” was plural and “ya’ll” was singular. And just TRY to sound them differntly, you PARVENUS!!
And, as a dyed-in-Yankee-blue Northerner, Dan Quayle was an idiot obviously picked by GHWB as some sort of Southern Compromise that didn’t remotelywork. We just thought of him as a retarded buffer that kept GHWB in office. Which he may have, since people were more exciteable back then.
Quayle was pushed heavily by the Manx-American lobby.
You missed something that a live viewer might not have. Here’s the transcript. Brit Hume asks Quayle what he would do if the President were incapacitated. What steps would he take.?
Quayle says that he would say a prayer. Then he talks about his experience and complains that he’s asked about hypothetical situations all the time. WTF?
Ok, so Quayle hit his talking points. Brit Hume asks the same question later in the debate: What’s the first thing you would do if you had to take over the Presidency in an emergency?
QUAYLE: “I don’t believe that it’s proper for me to get into the specifics of a hypothetical situation like that.” Then blah-blah about experience.
Right.
Later the question is asked for the third freaking time: see the Little Nemo quote.
Lloyd Bensen voiced the frustration of millions when he delivered his memorable put-down. Then Bensen addressed the question; he talked of pulling together a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff (presumably) when Quayle interrupted him out of turn.
Republican revisionists would have us believe that Quayle was just a misunderstood young man. Sorry, but that’s simply not the case.
That’s what perplexes me. I see that there is this effort to rehabilitate Quayle’s reputation, and to suggest that he wasn’t really very, very stupid. I don’t understand why they would bother?
What benefit is it to anyone to try to argue Quayle out of having been stupid. It isn’t like he carries the mantle of the Republican party. He’s an essentially forgotten VP from a one-term administration that nobody’s particularly fond of.
Is it because Republicans later put forth the lesser Bush, who is often regarded as somewaht less than brilliant? Do they not want a pattern to emerge? The only reason I can see for trying to cover that up is that they want to keep doing it in the future.
But really, why bother taking the time to pretend that Quayle wasn’t just plain dumb?
It wasn’t his stupidity that got to me (although I was living in Hawai’i when he informed us it was an island in the Pacific). It was his hypocrisy. Mr. Quayle was a hard-core pro-lifer who believed abortion should be illegal. Fair enough. What put me off him once and for all is, while he was vice-president, someone asked him what he would do if one of his daughters was raped. After some back-and-forthing, he said he would want her to have the option of having an abortion. That is what made me want to tell him that that’s all the pro-choice movement is asking for – that women have the option.
I’m sure Mr. Bush, senior, didn’t realize how much of a problem he’d be as vice-president. I suspect he was trying to appeal to young conservatives and find someone suitable to pass Reagaon’s torch on to. After all, Mr. Bush wasn’t seen as that much of a social conservative. It just didn’t go as well as he planned.
Yes, West Texas. But I did hear it in other parts of Texas, and other posters in this thread have indicated they’ve heard it elsewhere in the South. I suspect it’s one of those things done so often that one may not notice it, but then stopping to think about how it sounds, it doesn’t sound quite right.
In fairness to DQ (and I’m no fan), it’s a museum to the Vice Presidency itself. IIRC, his Indiana boosters wanted to build a museum just about him, but he insisted it more broadly be about the Vice Presidency and not just a one-man ego trip.
Hentor, the “happy campers” remark was during DQ’s visit to Pago Pago. The other misspelling I remember was the word “beacon,” which was misspelled with a “k” in the Quayles’ Christmas card one year.
jimmmy is right about why Bush the Elder picked him. I remember the Bush team also placed great stock in the fact that he’d cosponsored a jobs-training bill with Ted Kennedy and thus showed (or so they thought) that he could work in a bipartisan manner on Capitol Hill. I think they really thought DQ was a fresh, youngish, conservative pick who would compliment Bush’s elder-statesman image. IIRC from the press coverage at the time, they were appalled when DQ was so quickly revealed to be a shallow, less-than-brilliant guy, but dropping him from the ticket would have been too stark an admission that they’d screwed up, so they kept him on.
Some of the Dan Quayle verbal oddities have turned out to be Urban Legends. Many are real, but others have been falsely attributed to him, and it’s become difficult to separate the actual from the myth. Snopes has a page on this here.
And don’t dismiss the lightweight factor I mentioned above. If Bush had picked somebody like Jack Kemp as his running mate, there would have been rumblings from the right that it was Bush that should be dropped from the ticket.
Actually, the one I had in mind was:
The plural of “y’all” is “all y’all”.
Imagine the family dinner at Thanksgiving. Last minute marching orders are being issued.
“Geraldine, y’all go get the cranberry sauce and put it on the table. Billy Bob, y’all go bring in the turkey platter. Cletus, Sally, Timmy - all y’all run out in the yard and tell the grownups that it’s time to come sit down at the table, then go wash up.”
The names have been changed to protect the innocent, but that was the way it was in our Texas family.
Time to stand up for Quayle a bit… Certainly his education and grades are nothing to write home about, but the guy turned out to be a very good politician. Not only he win re-election at home by a landslide in a year when other Republicans were losing all over the place (the year the Democrats took back the house), but in the Senate he had a very good reputation. No one thought he was dumb. He managed to make his way onto some powerful committees, and did a very good job on them. He worked with Ted Kennedy to pass the Jobs Training Partnership Act of 1982, which is still considered a landmark piece of legislation. He chaired a committee on Senate Reform. He served on the Armed Services, Budget, and Labor and Human Resources committees.
As Vice President, he’s widely considered to be one of the most active Vice Presidents. He chaired the National Space Council, and the council on competitiveness. He became the administration’s representative to the House and Senate, where he won high marks for inclusiveness and his ability to bring all sides together. He was also very active in foreign affairs and traveled to more countries than any other Vice President.
As for all his gaffes, they come down to several factors - being uncomfortable in front of the media, and a tendency to go off-script. Politicians protect themselves from uttering gaffes by learning a few tricks, such as, “If you don’t know the answer to a question, answer a question you do know, even if it wasn’t asked.” For example:
“Governor, what do you think about the current HIV situation in Africa?”
Govenor slick: “Of course we are concerned about the situation in Africa. In my years as governor, I’ve traveled extensively and I’ve seen horrible problems around the world. Here at home, I’ve worked to address these problems by yada yada yada. We must always have concern for the downtrodden, whether they be a poor person with HIV in Africa, or an unemployed steelworker in my state.”
Quayle wasn’t very good at this. He’d try to answer the question, even if he wasn’t totally sure of his facts. That always gets you in trouble. Or, he’d give someone that ‘Deer in the headlights’ look while he tried to formulate a reasonable answer.
Another problem was that his malapropisms fed into his weakness, which was that he was young and inexperienced. The press always likes to find evidence to fit a pre-conceived story line, and once they have it, they’ll hang onto you like a pit-bull and blow up every little gaffe that enhances that story line.
Coupled with the fact that the press is generally hostile to conservatives, and that the opposition loved every bit of it and started ‘enhancing’ the perception with outright lies and urban legends, and there you go.
The same thing happened to Gerald Ford, who slipped a couple of times while the cameras were rolling, and became a ‘klutz’. He was the butt of ‘klutz’ jokes in the media for his entire presidency. And yet, he was probably the best athlete to ever hold the office.
Quayle’s not a genius. He’s was a good, hard working Congressman, Senator, and Vice President who was hounded mercilessly by the media.
As for why he was chosen, I remember at the time that the Boomers were becoming politically powerful, and there was lots of talk about how Bush was out of touch with them. Quayle was the first Baby Boomer to run for national office, and it was thought that he would act as a bridge to the new generation.
Here’s his official Senate Biography
Sam, Quayle may have, and probably did, get a bad rap. However, someone who chairs the National Space Council, and then gives the following statement, is just so far beyond mortal gaffing that its difficult to believe in his competence:
Has there ever been a thread about why Nixon chose Spiro Agnew?
Let’s also remember that there were a wave of Quayle rehabilitation stories in the press during the Bush I era. Journalists love posing “counter-intuitive” stories.
They were not convincing. And chairing the Space Council is typical fare for a sitting Vice President: they are regularly handed 3rd tier issues. Gore had competitiveness. Johnson had Vietnam (which became first tier after he became President).
---------- Politicians protect themselves from uttering gaffes by learning a few tricks, such as, “If you don’t know the answer to a question, answer a question you do know, even if it wasn’t asked.”
But that was Quayle was doing when asked what the first thing that he would do if he became President! He just talked about his experience.
In early 1989, some columnist - Safire? Wicker? mebbe Broder? - started a “Dan Quayle Rehabilitation Watch,” keeping an eye out, and asking his readers to do the same, for the first story in which DQ’s hitherto-unappreciated statesmanship, wisdom and mad political skillz would be illuminated. Sure enough, about two years later, the Washington Post had a multipart series (!) on just that topic.