From: AdmrlLocke@aol.com Sent: Sunday, September 27, 1998 4:47 PM Subject: Quayle: Column and IPT Appearance GrammNet Issue 9/27/98 Dear Friend, Here it is, once again hot off the presses: my column from today's issue of the Quad-City Times. This one is on Dan Quayle, who almost certainly will run for president. Speaking of Quayle, he appeared on Iowa Public Television last Sunday. Thanks to Quayle's top Iowa staffer, Gary Geipel, who runs QuayleNet, I learned about Quayle's IPT appearance in advance and got to watch it. If I can get a transcript, I'll send it over GrammNet. Quayle started haltingly, and should have been more direct in saying that he could withstand the sort of tabloid scrutiny the Bill Clinton appears to have unleashed on all of his critics. Quayle made the important point that to adopt an acceptance of lying about sex, as Clinton supporters demand, would totally repudiate the sexual harassment laws championed by the same people. Quayle also now supports some sort of unspecified flat tax, and mentioned that in the early 1980s he was a champion of a three-tier tax system (which served in some ways as a forerunner of the two-tier tax adopted in 1986.) No offense to Quayle: I'd have to say that Quayle's movement from the three- tiered system to a flat tax is a victory for Steve Forbes. If you'll recall, last time around, both Gramm and Buchanan ultimately adopted flat-tax proposals. So whether or not Forbes ultimately serves as president, he's already had the beneficial impact of moving three major Republican candidates away from progressive income taxation. (Not to mention the Democrats, like Dick Gephardt, who are proposing bogus "flat-tax" plans under pressure from Forbes and other Republicans.) Finally, Quayle voiced support for a very limited privatized component of Social Security, although he was very careful to strongly oppose full privatization. Again, this suggests some victory for Forbes' ideas, since Forbes was the first major candidate to call for privatization of Social Security--back in 1996. Well, that's my brief report on Quayle's IPT performance. As my column below suggests, Quayle is just going to have to get better on television if he wants to win the presidency. Sincerely, David B. Levenstam, CPA, MT, MA GrammNet is an independent newsletter, not affiliated with Senator Gramm To subscribe to GrammNet, email me at AdmrlLocke@aol.com, with a message to the effect that you'd like to subscribe. ----------------------------------- Quayle Impressive in Person By David B. Levenstam, CPA, MT, MA Don't count me among the long-time fans of former Vice President Dan Quayle. It's not that I disliked him; I just never found him particularly impressive, despite his successful effort to save the Patriot missile while in the U.S. Senate. He seems slow and halting on TV, as though he's reading from a prepared script he's trying to see in his head. And I've always thought his appeal to social conservatives came as much from the way liberals in the news media savaged him as from any concrete policy he's proposed. Quayle's "potatoe" gaff added to his other negatives the impression that he isn't too fast on his feet. For a candidate with high negatives to win the GOP nomination, let alone the general election, seems at least an uphill battle. I mentioned Quayle's negatives to his wife Marilyn when she visited a month earlier. She reminded me that many people thought Ronald Reagan's negatives were too high for him to get elected too. In particular, although she didn't mention it, back in 1980 many people didn't consider Reagan too bright either. Now Reagan stands as the shining exemplar (to use Reaganesque language) of a successful and beloved Republican president. Still, having high negatives hardly guarantees success. It remains to be seen whether Quayle can be another Reagan even off-camera. So I was prepared to be unimpressed when Quayle dropped by my neck of the woods recently to speak on behalf of the once and future representative from Iowa House district 50, Lynn Schulte. I was pleasantly surprised by Quayle's calm, quiet, thoughtful manner. Rather than beating mercilessly on Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair--this was before Clinton admitted misleading us--Quayle spoke in responsible terms about investigating more serious matters, like Clinton allowing the transfer of advanced American technology to the Chinese military. Nor was Quayle willing to jump to the conclusion that the transfers were in exchange for Chinese campaign contributions to the Democrats. On the contrary, Quayle thought the two incidents were most likely unrelated examples of how the Clinton administration got overly-focused on reelection, allowing short-term politics to compromise long-run ethics. According to Quayle, accepting contributions and transferring technology may have been moral lapses, but they were separate moral lapses, not a sale of foreign policy. You have to love such reasoned analysis. Unlike some social conservatives, Quayle supports renewal of Most-Favored- Nation trade status for China. While Quayle had opposed creation of the World Trade Organization, he recognizes that erecting trade barriers between Americans and Chinese people simply punishes ordinary Chinese but doesn't hurt the Communist government which oppresses them. It's an uncommonly insightful and principled position. When Quayle spoke about social issues he seemed more mature and articulate than back in 1992. His friendly, personable approach offered a welcome contrast to some of his more bombastic potential presidential rivals. He argued that we're suffering from a cultural depression, in which people's fear of violence is at an all-time high even as the number of violent crimes actually declines. He supports imposing responsibility for violence on individual perpetrators, rather than on society. Only by reimposing personal responsibility, he seemed to suggest, can we relieve people's unwarranted fears. To relieve the family from government interference, Quayle called for reviving a Reagan executive order which required analyzing how each proposed law would affect the family. Government could expand the choices of families, he argued, by cutting our taxes, allowing parents to spend more of their own money--and time--on their families. His most important and principled message was that government isn't a panacea, even on social issues. "There are limits to what government can do," he said. Even in the face of an angry audience member who demanded government censorship of movies and television, Quayle defended "the marketplace of ideas." He argued that government's role isn't to censor people. Rather, one of the most important roles of the presidency is to act as a bully pulpit, preaching voluntary restraint and acting as a role model--something he noted the current president certainly isn't doing. Maybe Quayle isn't likely to become the next Reagan, but he certainly impressed me with his intelligence and ability to think on his feet. If he can convey that impressiveness over TV, he might not have such an uphill battle for the presidency.