It all began following the nomination of Dan Quayle as George Bush’s running mate at the 1988 GOP convention. In the initial rivulet of news stories it was clear that no one, least of all the national media, had much of a clue about Quayle, except that he was a young, good-looking, and inexperienced “Reagan conservative.” That he was unknown was itself the most newsworthy element in his selection. However, within two days, the Indianapolis News—ironically enough, part of the media holdings of Quayle’s family—broke the story that in 1969, the then-draft-aged Quayle had decided belatedly to attend law school and had won a much-coveted spot in the Indiana National Guard that exempted him from possible combat in Vietnam. Moreover, Quayle had attempted to use his family connections to secure both the National Guard slot and admission to Indiana University’s law school.
When the East Coast press picked up the story, it was framed as a ghastly scandal. The salient charge was hypocrisy: service in the National Guard, which lessened the wartime risk to Quayle’s life and career, sat ludicrously at odds (it was said) both with his support at the time for the American effort in Vietnam and with his subsequent legislative record in favor of a strong national defense. In what was to become a pattern, ABC’s Jacqueline Adams reported that Quayle’s later “pro-defense rhetoric was almost comical.”
A secondary theme in the Guard story had to do with the intervention of Quayle’s family friends on his behalf. This dovetailed nicely with the then-nascent perception of Quayle as an undistinguished and rather dimwitted playboy, gliding passively through a charmed life. That perception soon came to overshadow the Guard story per se, and still bedevils Quayle today. The charge was—and is—that he is intellectually not fit to serve.
The first glint of this line of criticism emerged in a profile of then-Senator Quayle in The Almanac of American Politics, which said he did “not seem particularly cerebral”; this reportedly was distributed at the GOP convention by some who opposed Quayle’s selection for the vice-presidential slot. Soon thereafter came reports that his record in high school and college was mediocre at best, along with demeaning accounts of how he first came to seek public office. (In a conversation at a local golf club, Quayle was drafted to run for Congress in 1976 by a county GOP operative desperate to replace a contender who had dropped out of the race.) Finally, there was the allegation that Quayle’s legislative career had been unremarkable.
With the fall campaign in full swing, the media mercilessly continued to portray Quayle as a dolt. The task was made easier by his increasingly apparent personal limitations. Quayle plainly was not the most accomplished nominee Bush could have designated (something that could be said of many a vice-presidential candidate in American history). Having been plucked from relative obscurity and tossed without preparation into the heat of an intense national campaign, he was from the outset an unsure and imprecise candidate. One recalls his arm-waving exuberance on the day his selection was announced, and his awkward initial attempts to defend his military record against scrutiny: “I did not know in 1969 that I would be in this room today, I’ll confess.” The ensuing notoriety only compounded these weaknesses, as Quayle stiffened further—to the point of actually appearing frightened—in the knowledge that the least misstep would launch a new round of derision.
_____________
If anything, the level of opprobrium actually rose when the Bush-Quayle ticket was finally elected. The idea that Quayle was one heartbeat away from the presidency became a national joke. One week after the election, the New Republic asked, “Can journalists keep writing indefinitely that Dan Quayle is a moron just because he is one?” Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts said in a public speech that in the event of Bush’s death, the Secret Service had orders to “shoot Quayle.” Even some segments of the Right joined in: the American Spectator published a disparaging “Danny Quayle Reader” after Quayle remarked offhandedly that the monthly magazine was “hard to get through.”
For his part, Quayle obliged his critics by issuing a steady stream of bloopers. Thus, he referred to the people of American Samoa as “happy campers”; he spoke of the Holocaust as “an obscene period in our [sic] nation’s history”; and, most famously, he observed, “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind.” Yet as with Quayle’s uneven campaign performance, it may be questioned whether these sorts of gaffes added up to either incompetence or stupidity as opposed to inexperience or inarticulateness. On balance, and considering things on their merits, it seems clear that Quayle paid a much higher price for his personal shortcomings than, say, did the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1988 Lloyd Bentsen for his $10,000-a-ticket breakfast club for fat-cat lobbyists, or the presidential candidate Michael Dukakis for his absurdly counterintuitive response in a televised debate to a question concerning the hypothetical rape of his wife. And it may also be questioned whether the two-term Congressman and second-term Senator Quayle was any less qualified to run for the vice presidency in 1988 than, for example, the two-term Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro had been in 1984.
Hendrick Hertzberg, who covered the campaign for the New Republic, got closer to the real issue in an article entitled “Robo-flop”: “The question raised about the prospect of a President Quayle is the same as the question raised about the prospect of a President Bush and for that matter by the reality of President Reagan: how long can a great nation afford to have silly leaders?” This, from a man who wrote speeches for Jimmy Carter! Similarly, in a Time cover story last April, Garry Wills, after laying to rest several myths about the Vice President, suggested that the real problem with Quayle was not the degree of his intelligence or lack of same but rather his politics. “Not only was Quayle born after [World War II]—the first baby boomer so near the top—he is also the first man to have grown up entirely within the confines of the modern conservative movement.” In other words, ideas that could conceivably be dismissed as antique when held by a man of Ronald Reagan’s age were literally incredible in a forty-three-year-old. More than anything, perhaps, it was Bush’s designation of a committed conservative as “the man of the future” that grated and still grates on his contemporaries in the American intelligentsia.
_____________
That Quayle was a conservative in the Reagan mold seems, indeed, to have been the only substantive (as opposed to merely personal) fact most journalists managed to learn about him. That is reason enough to be grateful to Richard J. Fenno of the University of Rochester, who in a book published last year1 goes some way toward fleshing out Quayle’s early political career. It turns out, for instance, that despite the popular image, Quayle’s course was not that of an easy winner. To the contrary, he has always been cast in an underdog role, and has thrived on it. In 1976, at age twenty-nine and without any electoral experience, Quayle challenged a sixteen-year incumbent in a race for the House of Representatives that no one, including his father James, who published the local family-owned newspaper, thought he could win. But Quayle did win, and then compounded the trick in 1980, forsaking his safe House seat to take on and defeat Senator Birch Bayh, an eighteen-year incumbent and liberal icon.
In both races, Fenno observes, Quayle was considered an “unlikely success” because by the “conventional standards of political science, he was not a quality challenger—[he was] without experience or recognition.” In the 1980 race, after two terms in the House during which he seemed distracted and bored, Quayle was seen as “having to prove he’s a heavyweight,” and even after he had won, “Dan Quayle began his Senate service at ground zero in terms of [perceived] past achievement and without much compensatory future promise.” As Fenno puts it, the press wanted to say, “‘Look what Indiana did, trading Birch Bayh for someone without a brain in his head.’” But, he goes on, “this wasn’t true and they couldn’t say it for long.”
_____________
Quayle came to the Senate determined to make a name for himself as a consequential legislator. A chance assignment to the chairmanship of the manpower subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources put him in charge of the reauthorization of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), one of the most significant pieces of domestic legislation during the Reagan years. As Fenno describes it, Quayle adopted a consensus-building approach, persuading Senator Edward M. Kennedy to co-sponsor with him the 1982 Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), but without compromising on any important matter of principle. The resulting Quayle-Kennedy bill emphasized training over public employment and reduced the role of both federal and local governments in favor of private industry. Along the way, Quayle fought off several rearguard attempts by his committee chairman, Orrin Hatch, and the Reagan Labor department, to scuttle the initiative altogether.
Though Fenno’s book concentrates on how Quayle maneuvered the contentious JTPA legislation through each stage of congressional approval, Fenno also notes that Quayle’s reputation was enhanced by the leading position he took on arms-control issues from his seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. In 1987, Quayle’s initial opposition to the INF treaty with the Soviet Union forced the closing of some ominous loopholes in that document. Beyond this, Quayle chaired two special committees to reform the Senate committee system and the military-procurement process. “Each of these assignments could be read as a vote of confidence by the leaders inside the Senate,” Fenno observes. By 1985, the editors of Politics in America were writing that Quayle was “one of the twelve most effective but underrated members of Congress,” and the National Journal, calling Quayle a “Senate success story,” chose him as one of three potential “future Senate leaders.”
_____________
In addition to spending several months observing Quayle at work on Capitol Hill, Fenno also traveled with the Senator in his district and watched him campaign for reelection in 1986. In his six years in Washington Quayle had demonstrated a mastery of the arcane legislative procedures of the Senate, a talent for building coalitions across party lines, and a cleverness in playing off one part of the Reagan administration against another—all aspects of the “inside” tactical game in Washington. But on the campaign hustings he was not yet “a particularly articulate or persuasive or altogether powerful speaker.”
This was true in 1986, and it still seems to be true today. After two years in which he has operated more skillfully in the corridors of power than any of his recent predecessors as Vice President, the question still remains open of whether Dan Quayle has what it takes to be President. Now that attention is turning to the 1992 national tickets, the press is already focusing on whether or not a “dump-Quayle” movement is incipient, and we are being treated to replays concerning Quayle’s alleged mental incompetence. Once again, the press seems determined to overlook Quayle’s substantive record in office in favor of personal caricature.
The conceit that conservatives are dimwitted rubes has, of course, long been a staple of the political Left. In 1988 it was applied not only to Quayle but to the Bush presidential campaign as a whole, which was said to have played to voters’ ignorance through its “emotional” appeals to patriotism at the expense of “serious” issues like the federal deficit; more recent controversies over flag-burning and federal funding of the arts have been portrayed as pitting enlightened opinion against philistinism. Indeed, the whiff of cultural condescension has attended every Republican politician with a common touch for thirty years: Goldwater was loony, Nixon was crude, Ford slow, Reagan loony, crude, and slow.2
Yet despite Quayle’s less than powerful performance on the campaign trail, the fact remains that he was reelected in 1986 with the largest margin for a senatorial candidate in Indiana history. When he was selected to run with Bush in 1988, the GOP ticket was fifteen points down, and it was confidently predicted that his presence on the ticket “could only help Dukakis.” Yet Bush/Quayle ended up winning by eight points. This past summer, the Vice President proved a phenomenal fundraising attraction for Republican party candidates across the country. For all these reasons and more—I have not enumerated the many contributions he has made to the Bush administration as a serious and thoughtful pro-defense, pro-Israel conservative—it would be senseless at this stage to count Quayle out in 1992 or, indeed, 1996.
1 The Making of Senator Dan Quayle, Congressional Quarterly Inc., 180 pp., $19.95.
2 In his new book, See How They Run: Electing the President in an Age of Mediaocracy (Knopf), Paul Taylor of the Washington Post writes with refreshing frankness that Quayle was culturally “unacceptable” to the media elite.
