The Campaign Spectator/Rooting for Quayle

...Nothing more, nothing less...

...Mary's Kent Owen, Indiana editor of The American Spectator grew up in Huntington during World War II and the innocent years of its aftermath He is now living in exile, although he returns for reunions and funerals...

...W hen Indiana's last Vice President, Thomas Riley Marshall, took office 75 years ago, it was said, perhaps by William Allen White, that Indiana produces bumper crops of first-class, second-rate men...

...In Indiana he was damned up one side and down the other, and not without reason because his brusque opinions could exasperate even readers who largely agreed with his brand of politics...

...Besides that, the ambient mentality fostered by Central Newspapers, Inc...

...The closest the school came to being honored was when the name of the town's only Civil War general, a fellow called Slack, was proposed for it...

...Restrained, if not faint, praise, you say...

...Such an indignity can mean but one thing: America owes Huntington a Vice President, and it had better take Dan Quayle because the town may not get another chance...

...The day after the Republican Convention in New Orleans, the party's nominees descended upon Huntington, carrying on the agreeable tradition of visiting the vice presidential candidates hometown at the start of the campaign...

...Despite his wayward academic record, he's conscientious about his legislative responsibilities and, on the report of several observers, a rather quick study on issues that require skillful attention...

...Senate and, wonder of wonders, maybe to the vice presidency...

...Scratch Dan Quayle on nearly any issue, and ECP's attitudes come back to life overbold, full of feistiness, but with a sheen of manly glamour...

...Thus Indiana, with its tradition of penultimate leadership, stands ready to add the name of Dan Quayle of Huntington to those of Schuyler Colfax of South Bend, Thomas A. Hendricks of Shelbyville, Charles Warren Fairbanks of Indianapolis, and Marshall of North Manchester and Columbia City...

...As with so many of Indiana's towns, if you come looking for the grandeur of high culture, you're apt to go away disappointed...

...Or the bones of the last woolly mammoth to roam the moraines...

...But, then, the town fathers tended to dream big, even if they often thought small...

...There's nothing inherently shameful about flourishing at a lesser order of magnitude...

...All the same, the general effect he induces is one of purposefulness and sincerity at the service of public policy...

...His apparent qualities are engaging: he's personable, spirited, dutiful, and winning...

...After the band music, the singing, the entertainment, the introductions (Senator Dick Lugar did the honors), and the speeches—after the enthusiasm, the fervor, and the pride—Dan Quayle marched out on the courthouse lawn to face the press...

...If you leave out the more abstruse passages of Reagan economics and stick to lowering taxes, you get at the bottom elemental Pulliamismalthough ECP himself would surely have lambasted those responsible for the foreign trade deficit, the deficit spending, and the swelling national debt...

...The Wabash River, forking nearby like a green-stick fracture, withholds its sentimental charm until it gets downstream past Andrews...

...There'd been nothing like it since the palmy days of the VFW Street Fairs or late March of 1964 when the Huntington Vikings went to the final game of the state basketball tourney...

...And would have done so in a series of harsh-voiced editorials placed squarely in the middle of the front page...

...The fine old custom of Hoosier hospitality is notoften breached, except when interloping bullies gang up on a fellow townsman...

...The best advice is: don't get your hopes up too high...

...ince then, mediacrats have kept it 1.3 up with sound-bites-sense words that render Dan Quayle an instantly knowable object: light-weight, mediocrity, inconsequential, overrated, provincial, bumptious, and so on down the list of dismissive pejoratives...

...In some ways ECP never got over the Bull Moose vagaries of his young manTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 31 hood—he backed Eisenhower against Taft for the GOP nomination in 1952 and, even more astonishing, Johnson against Goldwater for the presidency in 1964, acts of apostasy that many could not forgive...

...On a hazy midsummer day the red tile roofs and the sand-colored walls, seen across the tassled cornfields of the old Kriegbaum farm, evoked the drowsy serenity of a medieval hilltown in Tuscany, whenever the friary's bell pealed out the angelus...

...Felix's Friary, a Capuchin establishment out on the Flaxmill Road...

...Or that he has shown little natural aptitude for national leadership...

...Several years of his childhood were spent in Phoenix, Arizona, where his father, Jim Quayle, worked for his own father-in-law's newspapers...

...Boom microphones and cameras thrust at him every which way...

...can tide over an impressionable youth, no matter how removed he may be from the true source of Pulliamism...

...And it was there, with the public address system turned on and up, that the ladies and gentlemen of the nation's media crowded round like a swarm of midges pestering the daylights out of him...

...As Indiana's county seats go, Huntington isn't so instantly presentable as Madison, Crawfordsville, Bloomington, or Columbus...

...Even a Hoosier loyalist will admit that the selection of Quayle came as a surprise, and that if the vice presidency were awarded on a meritocratic basis, there would probably be a more deserving nominee...

...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988...

...The old man was one hell of a guy, compared with the media moguls intent on corporational profit-maximizing and trimming their way to the top of the masthead...

...Just as Russell Pulliam dealt with his grandfather's life and career in an admirably even-handed manner, so have the Pulliam papers covered the campaign troubles of Dan Quayle with appropriate rigor...

...But an absolute standard in politics, especially for a Vice President, is beside the point...

...To the Pecksniffian charge that Quayle doesn't have whatever it takes to be President when he is "only a heart-beat away," the proper response is he may well have what he needs to be Vice President, which is, lest one forget, the office he's running for...

...In spite of the cunning depiction of what was meant to be Huntington, the film is now regarded by cineastes as one of the ten worst ever made...

...In ECP's heyday, the papers were engines of anti-Communism, anti-liberal quasi-conservatism, right-wing populism, small business capitalism, and reactionary virtuosity...

...There was no howling mob, no riot, no physical violence...

...Huntington's points of interest don't end at the bridge: Neo-Jacobean and Neo-Romanesque houses, fancy if ungainly survivors of the Gilded Age, make a stately progress up the slope of North Jefferson, and the Hotel LaFontaine, years ago worth two and a half stars and a detour in the Guide Michelin, is again open, this time as housing for the elderly...

...his name was Arthur Sapp, an infelicity that prompted no end of mirth from H. L. Mencken, Heywood Broun, and Sinclair Lewis...

...Then again, maybe not...

...For the most part, there was nothing personal about the animus Protestants and Catholics enjoyed toward one another...

...Hence the clashing of the faiths prepared Huntingtonians for the higher struggles of politics and basketball (until the early fifties the county of about 28,000 supported fifteen high schools and, moreover, fifteen varsityteams, including the Banquo Ghosts...

...Ordinarily, the folks of Huntington, Indiana don't intentionally give offense to wayfaring strangers...

...However, there was indignation aplenty over the fact that a U.S...

...Senate...

...This perplexity is akin to what you may think about the town's foremost citizen, Senator James Danforth Quayle III, the Republican nominee for the vice presidency of the United States...

...That Hagen Girl came out in the late forties, starring Shirley Temple (a California delegate at the New Orleans convention), who got her first romantic, on-screen kiss from a fading leading man, Ronald Reagan...

...Yet it makes possible a quasi-Venetian effect of tottery buildings squatting across the stream on the South Jefferson Street bridge...

...W hich is to say that Dan Quayle, like the small town he hails from, has more to offer America than is readily apparent...

...Self-knowledge of that kind, centered in humility, is what enables other Americans to overcome the limitations imposed by modest gifts...

...Another of ECP's grandsons, Russell Pulliam, an editorial writer on the News, produced a balanced account in Publisher: Gene Pulliam, Last of the Newspaper Titans (Jameson Books, Ottawa, Illinois, 1984...

...Peter and Paul's for the Germans) with grade schools attached, for many years a high school, the Victory Noll novitiate, and, formerly, St...

...What Dan Quayle can bring to the ticket is a certain humility, an awareness of his own inadequacies, a self-knowledge that he is not naturally among "the best and the brightest," a conviction that he must prove himself more economical and persevering in the use of his resources of character and ability if he is to make the most of them...

...From the suburban perspective of Brookline, Massachusetts, he must seem woefully deficient in those virtues of statecraft and political economy required to over-regulate Pittsfield, Holyoke, Gloucester, and New Bedford...

...Under his son, Eugene Smith Pulliam, the papers are less strident and abrasive in tone—and more scrupulous about keeping the news columns free of gratuitous comment—but still ready to give a licking to whoever or whatever irks the boss and his editors...

...More than that, nobody had ever seen so many dark-blue pinstripe suits in downtown Huntington on a weekday...

...So what then does Quayle bring to the Republican ticket that can help elect Bush...

...While the hostelry's service was somewhat less than Swiss, and its cuisine about on a par with Fort Wayne's, its pre-Franco Castilian decor made it pretty swank...

...Or the most extensive pickle jar collection this side of eastern Kansas...

...Or, what Michael Dukakis means, that the young man's background is too restricted to help him grasp the needs of ordinary Americans...

...push came to shove as reporters jostled and clambered and pressed ever harder...

...This is how and why democracy at its best works...

...The Shakespeare sunken rock garden, a beautified worked-out quarry, is recommended by the Chamber of Commerce, and Our Sunday Visitor, America's pre-eminent multi-diocesan Roman Catholic newspaper, thrives, thanks in part to a spiffy new look designed by a Suabo-Hoosier, Rolf E Rehe...

...There may be more here than meets the jaundiced eye...

...This does not seem so to the governor of Massachusetts who has let it be known that Senator Quayle doesn't understand America...

...Of course, the senator's outlook can scarcely be attributed to Huntington alone...

...There is no doubt which ticket the Pulliam papers will endorse...

...Although not one of the leading members of the Senate, he has grown into a competent legislator of better than fair-to-middling talents and accomplishments...

...For if there be a main influence on Dan Quayle to take into account, it is that of his maternal grandfather, the late Eugene Collins Pulliam, for thirty years the owner and publisher of the Indianapolis Star, the state's predominant paper, as well as of the Indianapolis News, the capital's real hometown paper, and others in Muncie, Vincennes, Huntington, and Arizona...

...Why this drain should have been needed was one of Huntington's beguiling mysteries...

...At such a moment The Thirty Years War, which the citizens of Huntington County revived and waged into the twentieth century, relented as if to observe the Truce of God...

...Also, it was boasted that Huntington possessed one of the world's most prodigious infrastructures, namely a main sewer with a diameter big enough to drive through a team of horses hitched six across, second only to the cloaca maxima of Paris, France...

...for the Irish, SS...

...The sight of marksmen atop the Evangelical United Brethren Publishing building and elsewhere around the courthouse square came as a jolt: this wasn't going to be just another festive homecoming for the junior senator from Indiana...

...There's a wearisome tendency either to overpraise or to overblame...

...senator and vice presidential nominee was roughed up in his own hometown by members of a profession whose ranks include three generations of his own family...

...Let's also give thanks that George Bush has a strong, steady heart and an excellent constitution...

...Better yet, it should encourage Huntington North High School (there are no other high schools of any direction in the county) to rechristen itself Huntington Quayle...

...But what Pulliam the elder was advocating forty years ago is in large measure what Ronald Reagan brought to pass...

...First things first...

...Dan Quayle may not be a heroic statesman, but neither is he a stupendous rascal or a dolt...

...It was going to be Huntington's moment in the sun, its one time to shine, its chance to show itself off to the whole world as a good place to grow up and live and work in, a nice, quiet town where one of the neighbors could get himself elected to the U.S...

...Truth to tell, his delivery involves too much random arm-waving, throaty emphasis, and unsteady trains of thought...

...It dawned on somebody that the school's athletic teams were liable to be nicknamed the Slackers, and the matter was dropped...

...As a notable event in the history of journalism, the repulse at Huntington was not singularly heroic, but it did mark the occasion on which a public gathering saw the media at work, disliked what they saw because of how it was being done, and voiced their objections...

...W hich brings up the larger question of the media's treatment of Dan Quayle's shortcomings...

...by Kent Owen In short, if you're not counting on wonders to happen, it's worth taking the chance...

...this was going to be about as big-time as it gets for an American town of 16,000...

...at the same time it is clear that Pulliam reporters are not stooging for the senator...

...Well then, so be it...

...it was simply a matter of whose souls were hell-bent for eternal damnation...

...What is needed in such a one is whatever the presidential nominee thinks and feels he needs and wants...

...And, mind you, in a kindly, well-meant way...

...Vivaldi and the Gabrielis would not have felt inspired...

...To the displeasure of low Protestants, Huntington remains one of Holy Mother Church's strongholds in northern Indiana: two parishes (St...

...Hoosiers excuse this lapse because the junior Quayle had not yet reached the age of consent...

...As a public speaker, he will not erase the memory of Daniel Voorhees, "The Tall Sycamore of the Wabash," or Albert Jeremiah Beveridge or James E. Watson, as the greatest orators that DePauw University has prepared for the U.S...

...Finally, no account of Huntington's place in the scheme of fame would be adequate without a mention of a movie that is based on a novel written about a scandalous episode in the town's genteel past...

...Even if the county courthouse resembles a municipal mausoleum for township trustees, the historical society's museum may well contain the death mask of Lamb-din P. Milligan, the Grand Knight of the Golden Circle...

...The same problem came up later in the twenties when a courtly local attorney was elected president of Rotary International, meriting local recognition...

...In plain view and clear hearing, this demonstration of the media's incivility got to the bystanding townspeople and they shouted and heckled and jeered, giving the media a strong dose of their own medicine...

...In point of fact, it was the News that broke the story about his enlistment in the Indiana National Guard and the involvement of that paper's retired managing editor, Wendell Phillippi, a former commanding general of the Guard, in securing a place for him...

...What he is, is an increasingly able young man of superb political instincts who has made his share of mistakes, suffered a few failures, gained a few successes, and, little by little, worked through the heaping up of experiences toward an understanding of how he canmost usefully serve his country...

...sharp questions—edged with a trace of malice—flew at his face...

...don't raise your expectations beyond what you can leap in a single bound...