Dan Quayle
Dan Quayle was Vice-President of the United States under George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1993, and became a byword for gaffes in a way that has been partly reconsidered. Born in Indianapolis in 1947 into a family that owned newspapers, he took a degree at DePauw and a law degree at Indiana University, gaining admission after initially being rejected. He served in the Indiana National Guard during the Vietnam War, an arrangement critics said his family connections secured. He worked in the state attorney general's office and won a congressional seat in 1976 at twenty-nine, then unseated the three-term senator Birch Bayh in 1980 at thirty-three. In the Senate he co-sponsored the Job Training Partnership Act of 1982 with Ted Kennedy, a substantial bipartisan achievement that is rarely mentioned alongside his name. Bush selected him in 1988 to appeal to younger and more conservative voters, and the choice was immediately controversial. In the vice-presidential debate he compared his experience to John Kennedy's, and Lloyd Bentsen replied that he was no Jack Kennedy — one of the most quoted lines in American political history. As vice-president he chaired the Council on Competitiveness and the National Space Council. In June 1992 he corrected a schoolboy's spelling of potato to potatoe at a New Jersey school, using a card supplied to him, and the image never left him. His 1992 speech criticising the television character Murphy Brown for portraying single motherhood as a lifestyle choice was widely mocked at the time and has since been treated more seriously in debates about family structure. He and Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992.
- Lived: 1947 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: vice_president
