![]() Quayle told the Manhattan Institute in a speech at the Waldorf-Astoria that New York was a mess because the liberal political policies of the past 40 years had failed. for a speech in New York that would be "about everything that was wrong with that city.’’ June 15, 1992, started with Quayle flying out of Washington at 8:15 a.m. At least that’s how he put it in his bio, Standing Firm. ![]() Through most of his term - traveling the world to represent the president, meeting heads of state, giving speeches to all types of groups - Quayle managed to avoid any serious gaffes. The newsmen, and many viewers, were left with the impression that, for all the jokes about him, the new vice president was a well-informed, politically savvy young man. Despite a few blunders by Quayle, the Bush ticket prevailed in the election of 1988.ĭays later, seeking to stifle the buzz in political circles that he was intellectually challenged, Quayle sat down with a group of top American political reporters for a televised two-hour discussion. Quayle knew his boyish looks might hurt him and worked hard to present a studious image during the campaign. When Quayle got on the victory podium with Bush for the first time at the GOP convention that summer someone remarked that he "looked like a guy who had just won a game show.’’ Quayle’s image had been fodder for America comedians since the beginning, in 1988, when GOP presidential nominee George Bush tapped the 42-year-old Senator from Indiana as his VP. "Image is all’’ in politics, Quayle said, and the media not only project images, but also brings out any flaw in the picture. To understand why, it’s important to know something about the way politics and the media work in America. Ever since, the ex VP has been a straight-faced political joke. Less than five months after the incident, Quayle and President Bush were voted out of office, replaced by Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Quayle ruefully reported on a Washington Post article that suggested the Trenton flub got such wide media play because "it seemed like a perfect illustration of what people thought about me anyway.’’ "Politicians live and die by the symbolic sound bite.’’ "It was a defining moment of the worst kind imaginable,’’ Quayle wrote in the autobiography. ![]() In his 1994 memoir, Quayle devotes a whole chapter to the events in a classroom at Trenton’s Munoz Rivera School - and the impact of them on his career. That’s the day, you probably recall, a Trenton sixth grader had to teach the Vice President of the United States that potato is not spelled with an e on the end. ![]() Six years out of office with two failed presidential bids now behind him, ex Vice President Quayle still ranks as America’s favorite dumb politician because of what happened in Trenton on June 15, 1992. Bush, whose picture morphed into a photograph of Dan Quayle on the screen behind the comic. Just the other night on television, Jay Leno was poking fun at some gaffe by George W. ![]()
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