Posted on 12/05/2015 6:23:18 PM PST by SMGFan
Dan Quayle says he's glad President George H.W. Bush picked him to be his vice president instead of Donald Trump.
Quayle discussed how Trump let Bush's camp know that he was interested in becoming the vice president in the 1988 campaign, during an interview with host John Catsimatidis on "The Cats Roundtable" on AM 970 in New York.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Trump is a successful businessman ... and an opportunist. And there’s not necessarily anything wrong with him being an opportunist - it a lot of the reason he’s a successful businessman.
It’s like the character Rodney Dangerfield played in “Back to School”. The business professor (an academic) is asking asking about typical startup costs and Dangerfield’s character (an actual businessman) starts laying out the need to grease the politicians, the union leaders, the corrupt city officials.
With hindsight, I think it was so no successor would be in the way for one or the other of his sons. The Bushes are shameless dynastic climbers. A strong and credible non-Bush successor would have been in the way. Part of the story is that Bush did -nothing- to support his VP when he was under fire.
I wondered why W had such old VP’s instead of grooming a successor. Same reason, and now we see the JEB! (ugh) campaign bringing all its glory to the Republican effort. I hope JEB!’s collapse is so total we will not have to deal with unindicted attempted rapist and loafer P down the road.
Quayle should have been dumped from the ticket in 1992.
Quayle’s spelling bee incident had zero baring on the outcome of election 1992. Bush signed off on the rat Congress’s tax hike and Perot split the vote.
And Bush still may have won if not for the politically timed Caspar Weinberger indictment a week before the election.
Too bad Reagan tapped Bush for VP.
Exactly. Conservatives should know better than to parrot the MSM without doing any independent checking. The MSM hyped a non-story because they wanted to destroy a GOP VP.
So sorry, should have used #41.
“He totally gave Clinton the presidency on a silver platter in an instance.”
Quayle was only one of many factors causing George H.W. Bush to lose the election:
1) He intentionally, and almost gleefully, broke his “no new taxes” pledge. He completely lost his integrity with that move. The conservative base of the party felt betrayed.
2) He ran as the “third term of Reagan” then once elected purged the party and his administration of most conservatives replacing them with globalists moderates.
3) He pushed NAFTA and other one sided free trade agreements. Ross Perot beat him over the head with the memorable statement about the “giant sucking sound” of jobs being lost to Mexico. This support likely cost him some of the Reagan rank and file union voters.
4) He looked incredibly stupid, and elitist, in one of the debates when he fumbled the response to a question about the price of milk.
5) James Carville ran a brilliant campaign pounding Bush over the “worst economy since the Great Depression.” Bush and his campaign managers were unable to come up with an effective response. The Democrats stayed singularly focused on this theme throughout the campaign. Not unlike the effectiveness of the “war on women” campaign theme against Romney in 2014.
6) He appointed the unknown David Souter to the Supreme Court instead of a real conservative.
7) Ross Perot split the Republican vote. Perot, running 3rd party, could not have captured almost 19% of the popular vote if Bush had been a popular president and strong candidate. Quayle didn’t account for the lost of votes to Perot.
8) Bill Clinton had a more engaging personality and didn’t come across as an elitist stuffed shirt.
9) Bush and his team were over confident. They underestimated Clinton and his team, they underestimate the attraction of the bumbling Perot as a candidate, and they didn’t campaign aggressively. They mistakenly believed the success of the Persian Gulf War would carry Bush to a third term.
Quayle certainly didn’t help Bush but likely didn’t hurt him much. To the extent Bush was hurt by Quayle it was Bush’s own fault in that he chose Quayle over some highly qualified options in 1988. There were some extremely powerful potential VP candidates in the wings with national reputations and stature unlike the unknown Quayle in 2008. Jack Kemp, Bill Bennett, Dick Cheney and Bob Dole come to mind. A wild card choice would have been Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s ambassador to the UN. Bush could have even chosen the fiery Pat Buchanan in order to unify the party, in the same way Reagan chose George H.W. Bush in 1980. In addition there were Republican governors at the time who had stronger records of accomplishment than Quayle and were more polished political performers.
Excellent analysis of what happened in 1992.
I gladly voted for Perot in 1992 to send a message to the GOP.
And guess what—they were so shocked that Perot got 19% of the vote, that Newt Gingrich came up with the Contract for America, and the GOP won the House in 1994, the first time in over 40 years.
Too bad it got pissed away in the 1995 shutdown and the 1996 election where Dole(low testosterone) was defeated.
I see what you did there.
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