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. Craig Kilborn noted, ruefully, “Quayle has agreed . . . to remain in the public spotlight for an additional three months until another national laughingstock can be appointed.”
It was precisely because of his status as national laughingstock, of course, that Quayle never stood a chance. In an age when television turns people into archetypes, he was caught in the wrong allegory and cast as Stupiditie. It’s moot whether Quayle would have made a good president, and his bid was certainly a strategic failure. But to snicker at it is shallow and glib. Quayle’s campaign was actually one of high intellectual purpose, of noble ideals and great programmatic specificity. With his departure, the 2000 race has lost such class as it had. No joke.
Quayle sought to run a Reaganite campaign. On domestic policy, he managed to be both stern and cheery. He revealed, for example, a precise three-point vetting process for picking Supreme Court justices. It didn’t include a litmus test on abortion, but it did include “an appreciation for morality and religion in our society.” He rued a separation of church and state that had come to mean “all state, no church.”
Quayle wanted to be a Reaganesque (or Rooseveltian) Happy Warrior, and succeeded. He took Reagan’s 11th Commandment (Thou shalt not criticize another Republican) to absurd lengths. When he announced for president last April, Quayle noted that he had agreed with Steve Forbes in 1996 — and still did. “Steve Forbes, in my opinion, is right on the issues,” he said. “We don’t have a substantive difference on the issues.” 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. You served in the Bush-Quayle cabinet. You’ve got a good message. I hope that you stay in this. We need you.”
His speeches were colorful, sophisticated, and fresh. Quayle had real blame to throw around, and he settled on regulation-mad legal elites as a whipping boy. But his attacks always had a lot of the left-populist flavor that Reagan was the last Republican to tap. “In funding its cultural agenda, the legal aristocracy has not worked alone. It has been aided by a willing and compliant news media and an entertainment community that transmits counterculture values. They live in gated communities and send their children to expensive private schools. This is their world. But it’s not the real world.”
What doomed the Quayle campaign in the end was that it’s no longer Reagan’s world either. Take economics. Quayle urged supply-side orthodoxy, attacked hikes in the minimum wage, and called for a 30 percent income tax reduction. Such policies wouldn’t have hurt the economy (and would have increased the sum of human freedom). 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.
Or take foreign policy. Quayle and John McCain were the only two Republican candidates to have one. Quayle’s was: Stop the bombing in Kosovo. (“A mistake from the get-go . . . a war that didn’t have to be fought.”) Stop military cutbacks and focus on big enemies. (“As a superpower, our role is not peacekeeping. Our role is peacemaking.”) Engage China. Except for their agreement on the need for preparedness, McCain’s foreign policy is largely the opposite, and it played better.
On both these issues, Quayle was yesterday’s man. But it wasn’t merely that Quayle failed to assimilate the end of Reaganism; it’s that he was wholly oblivious to the way Bill Clinton has transformed American politics. 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. 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? Probably all of them. I don’t really know.” 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.” In early August, a Los Angeles Times reporter suggested Quayle was running not to win but just to get a kinder judgment from posterity. Quayle replied, “I can see how people would say that.”
George W. Bush makes an interesting contrast. 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. Panicked into attending and cornered on affirmative action, Bush wound up mumbling Clintonesque mend-it-don’t-end-it platitudes. “What’s important to say,” Bush said, “is not what you’re against. It’s what you’re for. I’m for increasing the pool of applicants and opening the door so that more people are eligible to go to the university systems.” By contrast, Quayle grasped the issue forcefully. “Had I been there,” he said, “I would’ve opposed this idea that government should discriminate. I am absolutely in total opposition against quotas. I think affirmative action does need to be ended.” 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. Quayle cheerily tried to pooh-pooh the event as a “mid-semester review,” or a mere “fund-raiser.” After all, the straw poll measured little more than how much money you were willing to shell out to buy votes. So Quayle treated his eighth-place finish as a non-issue. In 1988 he might have gotten away with this. But in 1999 it was the Quayle campaign’s death knell.
There were exceptions. The Manchester Union Leader was ready to give Quayle its endorsement. The Boston Herald’s Don Feder was Quayle’s only outright backer in the press. Michael Barone of U.S. News made the more measured assessment: “You can make an intellectual case for Dan Quayle that’s a pretty strong one. He shows . . . a considerable mastery of the issues, in particular foreign and defense issues.” 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.” 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. Now that he’s ended his campaign, their attitude is: Good luck, Dan! Don’t let the door hit you on your way out!
Quayle in fact was the authentic polar opposite of Clinton in this race. Not that he got that message out, and not that it necessarily would have mattered if he had. The problem is that, loath as we are to admit it, Americans don’t want an opposite of Clinton. At the end of the 1990s, we want a president with a lot of Clinton in him — glib, unctuous, unspecific, self-satisfied. Well, lucky us! Given that only George Bush, Bill Bradley, and (maybe) Al Gore have a chance to win this race, we’re going to get one.
Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
