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George bush vice president potato6/30/2023 ![]() The vice presidency, alas, is a tough place to stage a comeback. He took on the fictional Murphy Brown and her decision to have a baby out of wedlock, then made a mash of the word “potato.” (Working off an erroneous flash card, he added an extraneous “e” during a stop at a New Jersey elementary school.) That only reinforced the worst many believed about Bush’s understudy. Quayle was immediately consumed by a controversy over his Vietnam War-era National Guard service, among other tempests, and was kneecapped in the one vice presidential debate, where Lloyd Bentsen devastatingly gibed, “ You’re no Jack Kennedy.”īy the time he took office, Quayle’s image as an intellectual lightweight and serial bumbler was sealed. All that was swept away the instant Bush unveiled Quayle as his vice presidential pick in August 1988 and the 41-year-old lawmaker took to the national stage, hopped up like a game-show winner on speed. Birch Bayh and turned himself into a respected student of arms control, among other legislative arcana. It’s hard to remember Quayle as the political wunderkind of Indiana politics, a deft campaigner who defeated the venerable Democratic Sen. Indeed, it’s something of a national pastime. The experiences of Bush, and especially Quayle, show that denigrating the office and its occupant isn’t a matter of race, partisanship or personal background. The vice presidency is an inherently subordinate position and one that sits ripe for ridicule. Anyone who doubts that is welcome to pull on their waders and slosh around the darker, danker portions of the internet.Īnd she faces a very different environment than the one that existed before the turn of the century, with the proliferation of cable news networks, a weaponized right-wing media complex and the bottomless maw of Twitter and other fire starters.īut the fundamentals haven’t changed. ![]() ![]() No doubt some of the criticism Harris faces is the product of racism, sexism or some poisonous combination of the two. “The headline of the paper was, ‘Quayle fails to make gaffe.’” “I remember one particular visit, a domestic trip to Rochester,” said David Beckwith, who served as Quayle’s vice presidential press secretary. ![]() Or better still, ask Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, who spent much of his four years in the White House as the rep-tied, apple-cheeked butt of countless jokes, from which his reputation never recovered. ![]()
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