Remember When Quayle Couldn’t Spell and Palin Didn’t Read?
Why it Should Still Matter
Vice President Dan Quayle was Bush Sr.’s attempt at getting the youth vote by choosing the young, telegenic senator from Indiana as his running mate in 1988. It all backfired on June 15, 1992.
On that day, Quayle visited an elementary school in New Jersey and took part in a spelling bee.
Students were asked to approach the blackboard and spell a word that Quayle read from a cue card. A boy correctly spelled “POTATO” but Quayle told him to add an “e”.
This was a scandal thirty years ago. The incident was fodder for late-night talk show hosts for days on end, the subject of numerous op-ed pieces, and even a headline that read “How to End a Presidency”. Had Bush won re-election — and even if he didn’t — Quayle was the logical choice to be the next Republican to run for the highest office. But his misspelling dashed those hopes forever.
To this day, if you type Quayle into a Google search, the first thing that comes up is the potato incident. That’s the legacy of someone who was a lawyer, House member, Senator, and VP.
Fast forward to 2008, when John McCain chose Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. She, like Quayle, was forty-two years old when chosen, and was expected to fill in the slots for women, youth, and conservative bona fides.
There was just one big problem that came up: Although she had a certain appeal as a speaker, she wasn’t exactly a Rhodes scholar or well-versed in details of policy and such.
What really brought her down and possibly affected the outcome of that race was an interview with Katie Couric. While she stumbled through questions of policy with her limited vocabulary, the question that really did her in was this simple one: “What magazines and newspapers did you read before being tapped for Vice President?”
Palin immediately said, “Oh, all of them,” but when pressed for specifics by Couric, Palin wouldn’t name a specific one. It’s possible that Palin did not want to name one for fear of upsetting her base (as an undergraduate, she majored in journalism), but the damage was done.
Her failure to answer such a simple question gave the impression that she didn’t read and that made her unprepared to be one heartbeat away from the presidency. Palin never fully recovered from that interview. Even now, she is expected to lose her comeback bid in an election to represent Alaska in the House of Representatives.
But these true stories bring me to a larger point: What has happened since then?
I was always surprised that neither Couric nor anyone else (to my knowledge) has asked that question of a candidate again. What are you reading? That would tell me so much about them.
But it no longer matters to a large swath of voters. Trump did away with the question by proudly announcing that he didn’t read and instead went with his gut. It has been reported that his daily briefings had to be condensed down to a few bullet points. Few cared; certainly, it didn’t upset his base — there were much worse things they overlooked.
I’d actually like to know what some of our House members are reading. It’s hard to believe some of them read at all, based on their Twitter feeds. The Senate and governorships are sort of considered a political step up from the House, but now we have to ask what they are reading. The rise of the celebrity politician — someone with no experience in policy or civic leadership — has given rise to a number of jaw-dropping moments of idiocy on the campaign trail, with little consequence from voters. (Those come much later when we have to clean up the mess.)
I’m not saying that educated people of either party can’t have bad intentions, but I think a baseline consideration should be one’s intellectual capacity or curiosity. If someone’s heart is in the right place and they have the desire to learn and grow, we might consider choosing said person over their opponent. But these days, finding a politician with heart may be as challenging as finding one with the ability to think critically.
These days, nearly half our population actually scorns education. They proudly claim their common sense, as if an educated person has none. (Much of our common sense comes from our acquired knowledge, folks.)
It’s not as if we haven’t been warned. For centuries, great thinkers have warned us about the dangers of willful ignorance and passive acceptance of growing authoritarianism (revisit Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451).
But if nobody is reading the great thinkers, how will we heed the warnings?
I leave you with two quotes below, and a fervent wish that we awaken our minds . . . before it’s too late.
“Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.” — Thomas Jefferson
“Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who made themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.” — Isaac Asimov
