Bye bye, Mr small potatoe

Spectator, The, Aug 7, 1999 by Steyn, Mark

Mark Steyn looks long and hard for a Republican rival to George Dubya

New Hampshire

`GOOD to see you, Mark,' said Dan Quayle, and looked me straight in the eye. Then he looked deep in my eyes. And deeper still, his twinkling baby blues lighting up the darkest recesses of my soul.

If he'd been anyone other than Dan Quayle, I'd have sworn the guy was coming on to me. But he is Dan Quayle and, even though he was talking about something called `unfunded man dates', er, `mandates', and it was a sticky 98 degrees in the un-airconditioned Masonic hall and we were all feeling a little groggy, it seemed more likely that he'd been advised to do the eye-contact thing because it's supposed to be forceful and presidential.

So, for want of anything better to do, I stared back at him. He stared into me even more intensely. I reciprocated. And, for what seemed like an eternity, there we were, eyeball to eyeball. I don't know what he was hoping to find round the back of my optic nerves, but I know what I was looking for: I was trying to see whether the former vice-president really, honestly, seriously believes there's any conceivable scenario George W. Bush gets struck by lightning, Elizabeth Dole turns out to be moonlighting as a lesbian lap-dancer in Atlantic City, anything - that will result in him standing up in January 2001 and saying, 'I, J. Danforth Quayle, do solemnly swear....' Eventually, after campaign aides prised our eyeballs apart, he said that he's the only candidate who can put back together the old Reagan coalition of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives and nationaldefence conservatives. But every Republican candidate says that. I'd like to know whether, deep down, he's thinking, like everyone else, `C'mon, man, you're Dan Quayle. It's never gonna happen.'

Now, I'm not one of those people who think Dan Quayle's a joke. During his troubled vice-presidency, when every third-rate hack was living high off the hog on lame-brain Quayle gags, I eschewed them. Even the 'potatoe' business wasn't entirely his fault: it was the end of the day, he was tired and, on the answer-sheet in front of him, the schoolteacher had written the word with an 'e'. Alas, you can get rid of vice-presidents more easily than tenured grade-school teachers. Six years on, he looks great - mature, distinguished, greying at the temples, perfectly presidential. `What an absolute dish!' said Darlene, the wife of my town's Republican chairman. The once-mocking national media have now decided he's an intellectual heavyweight: at the time of his famous attack on `Murphy Brown', a fictional character in a sitcom, for setting a bad example by having a child out of wedlock, he was derided as a squaresville loser out of touch with the Zeitgeist; now everyone - Republican or Democrat - talks about family values and Mr Quayle is credited in New York and Washington with being ahead of the curve.

Unfortunately for the intellectual colossus, no New York or Washington media were present on Saturday when he flew up from Long Island for a rally in my neighbouring town. Instead, there was a reporter from WN TK radio in Lebanon, New Hampshire, who looks barely old enough to remember the Quayle vice-presidency. `You say you're running for President,' she began accusingly, as if he was just some fellow who'd wandered in off the street and begun talking about defence spending. `What I want to know is, are you a liberal, a conservative or an ultra-conservative?' Apparently, these were the three categories she had on her tick-sheet.

'Er, I'm a conservative,' said Mr Quayle, disappointing many in the crowd.

`What do you think the crucial issue in the 2000 election is?' I asked my neighbour Tom during a break.

`No question about it,' he said. `It's where he stands on Waco.'

`Really?' I said.

`Yeah. The new evidence showing that the Feds deliberately started the fire in the compound.... I want to know Quayle's position on that.'

`Absolutely,' I said. As I left, the former vice-president was listening to Tom explain why Attorney-General Janet Reno should be indicted for murder.

Six years ago, the secret service boys would have blown away a guy like Tom long white hair and beard, a T-shirt emblazoned with the Second Amendment on the right to bear arms - if he'd tried to get within a hundred yards of the Vice-President. But ex-Veeps don't have secret service protection (even in a country whose citizens require little motivation to open fire on each other, no one has yet thought it worth the effort to take out a vice-president). You're a heartbeat from the presidency and then suddenly you're a million miles away again, trying to figure out a way back.

Barring a last-minute surprise, the Quayle candidacy will expire in the days after 14 August, when the presidential `straw poll' is taken in Ames, Iowa. The Iowa straw poll is a warm-up for the Iowa caucus, which is a warm-up for the New Hampshire primary, which is a warm-up for the compressed primary season of next spring. To those who say presidential politics is just about money, the Iowa straw poll responds: you bet! You have to pay $25 to vote in it, which would normally be a disincentive. But, happily, the candidates outbid each other to hire you to vote for them.