The Thinking Man's Candidate
Caldwell, Christopher
The Thinking Man's Candidate In praise of the underappreciated (if hopeless) Dan Quayle campaign. BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL WHEN DAN QUAYLE announced last week that he was abandoning his campaign...
...On both these issues, Quayle was yesterday's man...
...The problem is that, loath as we are to admit it, Americans don't want an opposite of Clinton...
...Quayle urged supply-side orthodoxy, attacked hikes in the minimum wage, and called for a 30 percent income tax reduction...
...It's moot whether Quayle would have made a good president, and his bid was certainly a strategic failure...
...Panicked into attending and cornered on affirmative action, Bush wound up mumbling Clintonesque mend-it-don't-end-it platitudes...
...Quayle wanted to be a Rea-ganesque (or Rooseveltian) Happy Warrior, and succeeded...
...I think affirmative action does need to be ended...
...In funding its cultural agenda, the legal aristocracy has not worked alone...
...Stop military cutbacks and focus on big enemies...
...With his departure, the 2000 race has lost such class as it had...
...The Manchester Union Leader was ready to give Quayle its endorsement...
...three months until another national laughingstock can be appointed...
...We don't have a substantive difference on the issues...
...After all, the straw poll measured little more than how much money you were willing to shell out to buy votes...
...News made the more measured assessment: "You can make an intellectual case for Dan Quayle that's a pretty strong one...
...It didn't include a litmus test on abortion, but it did include "an appreciation for morality and religion in our society...
...We need you...
...a considerable mastery of the issues, in particular foreign and defense issues...
...Take economics...
...It has been aided by a willing and compliant news media and an entertainment community that transmits counterculture values...
...BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL WHEN DAN QUAYLE announced last week that he was abandoning his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, comedians reacted like depositors during a bank run—banging at the gates to withdraw all the jokes they'd saved up for dead winter nights...
...Asked in June whether the question of his electability wasn't driving most of his potential supporters to Bush, he said, "I'm up against it all the time...
...There were exceptions...
...In early August, a Los Angeles Times reporter suggested Quayle was running not to win but just to get a kinder judgment from posterity...
...As a superpower, our role is not peacekeeping...
...When he announced for president last April, Quayle noted that he had agreed with Steve Forbes in 1996—and still did...
...Except for their agreement on the need for preparedness, McCain's foreign policy is largely the opposite, and it played better...
...The Boston Herald's Don Feder was Quayle's only outright backer in the press...
...I am absolutely in total opposition against quotas...
...No joke...
...But in 1999 it was the Quayle campaign's death knell...
...to remain in the public spotlight for an additional Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard...
...It's what you're for...
...Given that only George Bush, Bill Bradley, and (maybe) Al Gore have a chance to win this race, we're going to get one...
...He shows...
...You served in the Bush-Quayle cabinet...
...I don't really know...
...At the end of the 1990s, we want a president with a lot of Clinton in him—glib, unctuous, unspecific, self-satisfied...
...But it's not the real world...
...Quayle cheerily tried to pooh-pooh the event as a "mid-semester review," or a mere "fund-raiser...
...Michael Barone of U.S...
...His speeches were colorful, sophisticated, and fresh...
...Had I been there," he said, "I would've opposed this idea that government should discriminate...
...He rued a separation of church and state that had come to mean "all state, no church...
...He took Reagan's 11th Commandment (Thou shalt not criticize another Republican) to absurd lengths...
...Our role is peacemaking...
...But in general, the Indianapolis Star, a Quayle organ, was right to lament that "today's hip reporters just cannot bring themselves to write about Quayle without a sneer in their choice of words...
...Quayle had real blame to throw around, and he settled on regulation-mad legal elites as a whipping boy...
...it's that he was wholly oblivious to the way Bill Clinton has transformed American politics...
...George W. Bush makes an interesting contrast...
...On domestic policy, he managed to be both stern and cheery...
...In an age when television turns people into archetypes, he was caught in the wrong allegory and cast as Stupiditie...
...This is their world...
...Don't let the door hit you on your way out...
...Or take foreign policy...
...But they were focused on the need to stimulate entrepreneurship—a pressing concern when Reagan ousted Carter, but rather a coals-to-Newcastle proposition today...
...Quayle and John McCain were the only two Republican candidates to have one...
...But his attacks always had a lot of the left-populist flavor that Reagan was the last Republican to tap...
...He revealed, for example, a precise three-point vetting process for picking Supreme Court justices...
...Craig Kilborn noted, ruefully, "Quayle has agreed...
...What's important to say," Bush said, "is not what you're against...
...What doomed the Quayle campaign in the end was that it's no longer Reagan's world either...
...I hope that you stay in this...
...You've got a good message...
...Now that he's ended his campaign, their attitude is: Good luck, Dan...
...Not that he got that message out, and not that it necessarily would have mattered if he had...
...There was something positively archaic—something so . . . eighties— about Quayle's unwillingness to avoid questions, his eschewal of spin, his attempts to tell the truth as best he could...
...I'm for increasing the pool of applicants and opening the door so that more people are eligible to go to the university systems...
...But it wasn't merely that Quayle failed to assimilate the end of Reaganism...
...Quayle replied, "I can see how people would say that...
...In 1988 he might have gotten away with this...
...Bush got trapped in an embarrassing situation last July, having scheduled a full campaign day in Seattle while 6,000 quota-chasing minority journalists were holding their Unity '99 convention there...
...Quayle's campaign was actually one of high intellectual purpose, of noble ideals and great programmatic specificity...
...Engage China...
...A mistake from the get-go . . . a war that didn't have to be fought...
...Quayle sought to run a Reaganite campaign...
...They live in gated communities and send their children to expensive private schools...
...Probably all of them...
...It was precisely because of his status as national laughingstock, of course, that Quayle never stood a chance...
...American political journalists are ever ruing the lack of serious engagement with "the issues," but when Quayle tried to focus on the issues in a considerable way they ignored him...
...Quayle in fact was the authentic polar opposite of Clinton in this race...
...Steve Forbes, in my opinion, is right on the issues," he said...
...So Quayle treated his eighth-place finish as a non-issue...
...But to snicker at it is shallow and glib...
...Quayle's was: Stop the bombing in Kosovo...
...By contrast, Quayle grasped the issue forcefully...
...Such policies wouldn't have hurt the economy (and would have increased the sum of human freedom...
...Well, lucky us...
...Asked in May whether Clinton wasn't being unfairly blamed for Chinese espionage, Quayle made the amazing reply, "Did it occur on Reagan's watch, Bush's watch, Clinton's watch...
...When Lamar Alexander became the first casualty of the Iowa straw poll, certainly taking some heat off Quayle, Quayle made this extraordinary plea on the Fox News Channel: "Lamar, if you're listening . . . Look: You were elected governor twice in the state of Tennessee...
...That could stand as Quayle's epitaph: Had I been there . . . By June, Quayle's campaign chairman Kyle McSlarrow was sending out press releases saying, "We are delighted to have cut George Bush's lead to a mere 45 points...
...But the unsuitability of Reaganite politicking to a Clintonite world was put on ultimate display in August at the Ames, Iowa, straw poll...
Vol. 5 • October 1999 • No. 4
