Way back when George Bush -- the original recipe one -- was president, there was some suspicion that Vice President Dan Quayle wasn't as stupid as everyone thought he was. The theory went that the White House, realizing that a President Quayle was just never going to happen, decided to use Quayle as Bush's political escape pod. Whenever Bush started getting criticism, Quayle would misspell potato or buy an anatomically correct nutcracker-doll or get a marble stuck up his nose or fall down a manhole and, presto, different headlines. "HOW MUCH DID BUSH KNOW ABOUT IRAN-CONTRA?" could be changed to "QUAYLE WAS AN IDIOT AGAIN" overnight.I don't give this hypothesis any credence. Quayle later ran for president and he still pops up occasionally as someone who wants to be taken seriously, so I doubt he had agreed to throw his future career out the window. I think this idea works because; 1) Bush was always getting criticism toward the end of his term, and 2) Quayle was always being an idiot. Call it a convergence of PR disasters. But it'd be bad politics all the way around -- most obviously for Quayle, but also for the president who chose him.
I thought of this -- you can't really call it a conspiracy theory, but I guess that's the closest description -- last night when I saw this piece by Politico's Roger Simon:
Where’s George? The president, I mean.
You remember him. Dubya. No. 43. Won a second term a few years ago. It was in all the papers.
But where has he been lately? Where has he been during America’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?
Nowhere. AWOL. Every now and then, when the stock market takes yet another sickening plunge, a few words issue forth from the presidential lips. A very few words. Delivered with the greatest reluctance.
If ever there were a president who needed everyone to say, "Hey, look over there!" it's this President Bush. You think you've got scandal fatigue, imagine how he feels about it. The problem is that he's getting exactly the distraction he needs, although it's probably not the distraction he prays for with all his little heart.
The McCain campaign provided that distraction yesterday by imploding...
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