The “Quayle Revisionism Award” had the effect of discouraging many of the usual bootlicking articles. For three years the original dimwit angle held up well, both because of fresh material for ridicule provided by Quayle himself (remember his anatomically correct doll?) and because the vice presidency is an almost useless place for real action. Quayle’s actual role in government, whether smart or stupid, couldn’t do much to affect the public judgment. Relentless gag writers have now made him the butt of more jokes than anyone except Saddam Hussein.
Recently, however, the jokes seem a tad shopworn. When Quayle looked silly by saying he would be a “pit bull” in the 1992 campaign, David Letterman got off a line about it (“For Halloween, he’s going to be a Ninja Turtle”), but the general reaction was curiously tame. The jokes aren’t dead yet; they wouldn’t get told if they didn’t get laughs. But Quayle-hunting weather may be shifting.
One sign of that came last week with the advance release of a series of “Doonesbury” strips. In another climate, the press reaction to the cartoons might have meant a bad week for the vice president. After all, the most dramatic factual charge in the strip–that a Drug Enforcement Administration file on Quayle had been opened in the early 1980s–was reluctantly confirmed by the DEA. More startling, the Los Angeles Times reported that in 1982 a Justice Department official was asked by an assistant U.S. attorney in Indiana to attempt a sting operation against the then senator Quayle.
The reason the story didn’t ignite–then or now–is that despite extensive digging, not a shred of real evidence has been presented to suggest that Quayle ever used cocaine. The convicted drug dealer who prompted the probe was interviewed at length by “60 Minutes” and freelance journalist Cody Shearer, but he flunked a lie-detector test and broke into tears, confessing that he made the whole thing up. While “Doonesbury” alludes to the cocaine allegations being “hearsay” and “unsubstantiated,” it fails to mention that the accuser recanted. Satirists are paid to be savage and unfair. But because Garry Trudeau sometimes conveys news, he is taken literally. The cartoonist’s aim was to get more mainstream press attention for the charges of a “cover-up” of the probe just before the 1988 election, now the subject of a lawsuit. He succeeded, but also found himself cast in the unlikely mold of Alan Simpson at the Anita Hill hearings–spreading personal innuendo (in this case, implying that Quayle was a drug user). Quayle, in turn, looks like the victim. In today’s high-tech lynch-mob world, of course, the biggest “victim” wins.
An even sharper pro-Quayle shift may come in the weeks ahead , when long profiles are scheduled in four major newspapers. Commitment of the resources necessary for such stories is not usually made just to find out the same old thing. The new angle most likely will be-surprise!-that Quayle is not as dumb and unimportant as we have been led to believe. He actually has good political instincts on Capitol Hill and within the GOP, and is listened to inside the White House. This is certainly the rumored word on a six-month investigation into Quayle’s vice presidency being prepared by David Broder and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. Others subjected to Woodward’s reportorial charms have also expected positive results, only to be unpleasantly surprised. But if the article does turn out to be at all favorable, it will be interpreted by the Washington establishment as a seal of approval from the highest echelons of political (Broder) and investigative (Woodward) journalism.
The image rehab effort has always been successful on the chicken-and-peas circuit, where Quayle has raised some $15 million for GOP candidates at more than 300 events. That’s a lot of I.O.U.s to be converted in 1996–as Richard Nixon did in 1960 and George Bush in 1988. Unlike the Democrats, the GOP tends to give its nomination to the candidate who has “earned” it. At a minimum, Republicans agree that any talk of dumping Quayle next year is now preposterous. Bush’s illness last spring didn’t change those odds.
Quayle’s problem is that even if he gets a ride up in the conventional wisdom now, it won’t mean much. Yet another revisionist view will undoubtedly emerge to portray Quayle as just as empty as ever. That won’t matter either. Whichever way his arrow points, he remains the same person, with the same gaze, the same brain and the same uneasy relationship with millions of understandably skeptical voters.
