I told you so.
I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.
Jack Hughes told you so. He told you and he told you and he told you. But you all have the nerve to act surprised that Dan Quayle saved the republic.
by Jack Hughes
Gore Vidal said the most beautiful words in the English language were: “I told you so.” Over the past year The Experiment has waged a long, lonely, and, at times, losing campaign to convince readers former Vice President Dan Quayle was on the road to redemption and a resurgent force in American politics. Our loved ones were so confused and concerned they asked: “What is it with you and Quayle?” True story.
In August 2020, we pointed out Quayle had positioned himself to be Mike Pence’s mentor and masterminded the effort to ensure Donald Trump didn’t replace him as his running mate. In November 2020, we praised Quayle for being among the first Republicans to call on Trump to accept the election result. And in February 2021 we applauded him for being among the few Republicans to attend Biden’s inauguration.
Most recently, back in June 2021, we wrote Quayle stood on the right side of history by coming out in favour of Liz Cheney’s vote to impeach Trump and saying those who invaded the Capitol on January 6th “and others” should be held fully accountable – leaving no doubt who he meant. Truth be told, we wrote about Quayle on so many other occasions that The Experiment’s Editor-in-Chief was actually apologetic.
Why the victory lap? Well, my friends, earlier this week the Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist Bob Woodward dropped a bombshell from his blockbuster latest book about the final days of the Trump presidency. He revealed that in late December 2020, Quayle had talked Pence out of denying, delaying, or deferring the certification of the presidential election results. In short, Dan Quayle saved America.
I told you so.
According to Woodward, Pence called Quayle to tell him that Trump was pressuring him not to certify the election result and asked if there was anything that could be done. Quayle was firm: “Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away.” When Pence claimed, “You don’t know the position I’m in,” Quayle gave him no ground: “I do know the position you’re in. I also know what the law is.”
Readers may recall that in 1993, after Bill Clinton had defeated George H. W. Bush, it fell to Quayle – in his capacity as Vice President and President of the Senate – to certify the very election result which removed him from office. Drawing on that personal experience Quayle remained unflinchingly unequivocal during the crucial exchange: “You listen to the Parliamentarian. That’s all you do. You have no power.”
Pence reportedly said there were some who felt that he did have the power to send the results back to the House of Representatives where Republicans held a majority of state delegations. Quayle interrupted him: “You don’t. Just stop it…Mike, don’t even talk about it.” When Pence said “Well, there’s some [fraud] out in Arizona…” Quayle cut him off: “Mike, I live in Arizona. There’s nothing out here. Good going.”
Outside of The Experiment’s regular readership, the reaction to all this was stunned surprise. Veteran NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell spoke for many, “Wow, Dan Quayle comes to the rescue of the Republic.” CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote, “You probably haven’t thought about Dan Quayle in a really long time. It’s OK, I haven’t either.” The Hill’s Reid Wilson tweeted “I didn’t see the Dan Quayle cameo coming.”
Twitter responses generally fell in one of two categories. Most employed the analogy of a bingo card, as in: “I did NOT have Dan Quayle on my ‘Saving the Republic’ bingo card” / “Dan Quayle as a hero of democracy was not on my bingo card for this or any year.” / “I have to confess I did *not* have Dan Quayle on my bingo card” / “Who had Dan Quayle helping to save democracy on their Apocalypse bingo card?”
The other category was to describe it all as a shocking ‘third act’ plot twist in a movie nobody could’ve foreseen – with some folks even invoking a Hollywood filmmaker famous for his surprise final scene plot twists: “Dan Quayle coming into 2021 like some M Night Shyamalan twist.” / “Dan Quayle is the plot twist none of us saw coming M Night Shyamalan is kicking himself right now he didn’t think of this first.”
I told you so.
But from our perspective perhaps the most satisfying tweets were from those who allowed for the possibility, however improbable or implausible, that this could have been predicted: “Congratulations to those of you who always knew that Dan Quayle would someday save the republic of the United States.” (This is no time for humility, even if loved ones who’d once fretted about us being insane now find us insufferable.)
Having banked some credibility as prognosticators, we want to double-down on our predictions about Quayle’s personal redemption leading to a return to the political arena. To that end, we noted the insightful journalist Matthew Yglesias tossed a cryptic tweet into the mix that aligned with something The Experiment had been highlighting throughout: “Dan Quayle is younger than Donald Trump or Joe Biden.”
Quayle is younger than a lot of political leaders – not only Trump and Biden but also Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. In fact, there are 15 people in the U.S. Senate today older than Quayle - who is now a Hero of the Republic at age 74 - and by the end of the year 30% of all Senators will be age 70 or older. Looking at the midterm election map for next year, Democrat Senator Mark Kelly is up for re-election in Quayle’s adopted home state of Arizona.
If, hypothetically, Quayle were to run and take back the Arizona Senate seat for the Republican Party – and, with it, control of the Senate – he might be well positioned to take on the mantle of the Responsible Republican in the 2024 presidential election. For those who think this is far-fetched, or who haven’t read our earlier work, recall Biden, like Quayle, twice ran unsuccessfully for president before winning at age 78.
All this bring us full circle in one other sense. Forty years ago, back in 1991, Bob Woodward and his Washington Post colleague David Broder did a deep dive “behind the caricature of Dan Quayle.” They interviewed over 200 people who knew Quayle best, both colleagues and critics alike, to come up with a comprehensive account of the man. That work became a book The Man Who Would Be President – Dan Quayle.
Jack Hughes is a communications consultant based in Canada. His previous contributions to The Experiment include “Same of Thrones,” “Tippecanoe and Agnew Anew,” “Harris / Shuri 2020,” “Bidenfeld,” “Firth and Firthiness,” “The Ballot of Bill McKay,” and “The World Wants ‘The West Wing,’” among others. His inexplicably extensive writings on Dan Quayle are “The Unusual Suspect,” “The Unusual Suspect II,” “The GOPfather,” “Porqua, CoQau?”, “Quayle’s Hunting Season” and “I Told You So.” Connect with him on LinkedIn here.
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