JD Vance, you're no Dan Quayle
The much-maligned former VP did his duty. The man who wants to be the next one confirmed he won't.
My rapid reaction to the other night’s vice-presidential debate:
“There was a vice-presidential debate the other night?”
From what I’ve read, Vance had the better night, at least style if not on facts. (Don’t know if you were aware, but the Trump campaign is known to fudge the truth now and then.)
As for Walz I hear he started out extremely nervous but settled as the night went on. He did apparently go all in on the “fire in a crowded theater” analogy as magic words which allow for censorship, which means that if you were playing a @BadLegalTakes themed drinking game you are now legally dead.
But the only time anyone has really paid attention to these things were when a fly landed on Mike Pence’s forehead and when Lloyd Bentsen demolished Dan Quayle with the “you’re no Jack Kennedy” line. Which resulted in…the Bush-Quayle ticket winning a 40-state landslide. So, yeah, these debates don’t matter any more than the office of the Vice Presidency matters.
By the way, remember when we all thought Quayle (who’d been in the Senate for 12 years when he got the VP nomination) was way too inexperienced for the job and then we laughed about how stupid he was because he misspelled “potato”? Those were the days, when that was the bar for a laughingstock politician.
Also Dan Quayle literally helped save democracy on January 6, 2021, while Vance confirmed he would have helped destroy it.
As MAGA-fuelled rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6, Vice President Mike Pence sought counsel from his Indiana-born predecessor about whether he should certify the election results as required under the Constitution.
Quayle told Pence to suck it up and be a man about it:
…now comes new evidence, in a book about January 6 from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (titled, appropriately, Peril), that Pence wavered and perhaps even leaned toward helping Trump blow up democracy. If this account undermines Pence’s assumed heroism, it also raises up a new and even less likely hero: former vice-president Dan Quayle.
Quayle was long a figure of fun as the man who got torn limb from limb by Lloyd Bentsen in a 1988 vice-presidential debate and then insisted in a spelling-bee appearance during the 1992 reelection campaign that “potato” was spelled “potatoe.” When he ran for president himself in 2000, he dropped out after finishing eighth in the Ames Straw Poll the summer before the election.
But for Mike Pence, Quayle was a precursor as a Hoosier veep and social-conservative champion, so it’s natural he consulted him about the big decision on which he was initially inclined to do what Trump asked of him. According to the Washington Post’s gloss of the Woodward-Costa book, Quayle wore Pence down:
Quayle was adamant, according to the authors. “Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away,” he said.
But Pence pressed him, the authors write, asking if there were any grounds to pause the certification because of ongoing legal challenges. Quayle was unmoved, and Pence ultimately agreed, according to the book.
In the end it probably doesn’t matter exactly how seriously Pence thought about throwing the country into a constitutional crisis on January 6, though in some corners of MAGA-land, knowing he considered it but then got bad advice might make some folks regret the murderous feelings they harbored for him at the time. But let’s hope no one is ever again put in the position of being tempted by this devilish temptation. As Dan Quayle might put it, our Constitution cannot tolerate a coupe.
Makes you feel bad in retrospect about all the Dan Quayle jokes you told, right?
Eh, I suspect not, although the one about him wishing he’d studied Latin so he could speak to people in Latin America was a hoax.
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