Roedecker
Banned
I started another thread on the subject of VP Quayle being dumped from the ticket just before the '92 election. The scenario his from a 2000 book on "What If" possibilities in American history.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=25706
Here is the scenario:
What if George Bush had chosen a different running mate for the 1992 election? In June 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle surprised the nation by announcing, "I will not be a candidate for the vice presidential nomination." Over the electronic chirping of reporters punching in their office numbers on cell phones, Quayle continued: "This was my own decision , which I made after talking at length with my family. I have decided instead to enter the gubernatorial race for governor of my home state of Indiana." As the reporters began shouting questions, Quayle who had once described himself as "Dr. Spin"-attempted to explain the sudden change in plans. "I am from there, Marilyn is from there, and I would like my kids to experience growing up there, too. For too long my family and I have lived in the glare of the media spotlight here in Washington, and, quite frankly, we've suffered for it. I saw an opportunity to go back home and once again serve the people of my home state, and that's what I'm going to do. "It was my own decision," Quayle repeated. "Just mine and Marilyn's, and after I talked on the phone with President Bush yesterday and told him of my plans, he offered nothing but his highest support and best wishes."
Despite Quayle's carefully laid-out reasoning for leaving the Bush administration, the national media saw through the smoke. DAN DUMPED! screamed the headline of the New York Post the following morning. In fact, despite the concrete-solid denials of the Bush presidential campaign, Quayle had been dumped from the ticket. His days as vice president had become short from the time of Bush's less than strong performance in the spring Republican primaries, but it had taken vigorous machinations behind the scenes by Bush's top advisor, Secretary of State James Baker, to remove Quayle from the post he had clung to so tenaciously. Baker had never held much respect for Quayle's professional abilities, nor had the two men ever warmed to one another personally. Baker had first tried to convince Bush to drop Quayle from the ticket after Bush's poor showing in the New Hampshire primary early in 1992, telling him that with Quayle on board he could lose the fall election. "If you lose the election, your success in Iraq and in Panama won't matter," Baker had predicted. "A one-term presidency is always considered a failure, no matter what transpired during that time."
Baker had been able to cite several precedents of vice presidents being asked to step aside. Bush had been a part of Gerald Ford's administration when Ford had dropped Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in place of Kansas senator Bob Dole; FDR had substituted Henry Wallace for John Nance Garner in '40, and even Abraham Lincoln had replaced his first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, with Andrew Johnson in 1864. But despite the history lesson , Bush remained stubbornly loyal to Quayle. "Daaan Quaaaayle is up to the job, has a real handle on it. And he's learning more every day," Bush said. "I don't care if keeping him on puts us in deep doo-doo; I'm not gonna do it. Not gonna drop him like that."
But Baker and several other Bush cabinet officers, including Richard Cheney, the secretary of defense, and Lamar Alexander, secretary of education, were convinced that there was a possibility the Republicans could lose the fall election if something dramatic wasn't done to break the administration out of the doldrums that it had fallen into, and the most obvious solution to most people seemed to be to find a way to replace Quayle on the ticket. They had to find an alternative, one that was so attractive that it would overcome even Bush's stand. Baker, working with several members of the campaign committee, decided to approach the most popular person in the administration to serve with Bush. But Colin Powell wasn't interested. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had masterminded the military strategy that had overwhelmed the largest army in the Middle East, and following the Gulf War, he had scored approval ratings in the polls that were even higher than those of Bush. But while Bush had seen his poll numbers steadily decline to alarmingly low levels, Powell's had continued to float in the stratosphere.
Powell had little interest in politics, and on two separate occasions he rejected any suggestion that he replace Quayle on the Republican ticket. After Bill Clinton won the Democratic presidential nomination in the primaries, however, Bush's friend Cheney approached Powell a third time. "I don't blame you for not wanting to jump into politics," Cheney said. "It would be hard on your family, and hard on you. You'd spend all you days being told where to go and what to say instead of giving orders. It's an unpleasant duty." Cheney paused, letting the word "duty" hang in the air. "But look at it from another point of view. If Bush should happen to lose the election-I don't think he will, but it is a possibility-then that draft dodger Bill Clinton will be in the White House as commander in chief." Cheney paused again. Powell was a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, and there was no need to ask him how he felt about someone who had schemed so strenuously to avoid serving his nation.
Before Powell could respond, Cheney continued, "You created the Powell Doctrine: Go in with the force to do the job and do it right. No more fighting with a self-imposed disadvantage. The Powell Doctrine will change how America fights its battles for the next fifty years. Well, we need the Powell Doctrine here. We might win with the team we've got. But we might not. Why shouldn't we go into the fight with the best we have to offer?" As Cheney sat across from Powell, there was no indication in Powell's face that anything he had said had moved the general's position even an inch. Powell stared at Cheney with a furrowed brow, looking quite displeased that this arrangement had been presented to him a third time. "Okay, I'll do it," he said, his terse response making it clear that he wasn't going to be an enthusiastic candidate . With Powell agreeing to run with Bush on the fall ticket, the problem once again was Quayle. He could jump off the ticket or he could be pushed, but Baker knew that it would be easier for Quayle to make the jump if he had a soft place to land.
After a late-night meeting between Clayton Yeuter, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Rex Early, the Indiana chairman of the Republican Party, a plan was organized. Yeuter flew to Indiana to meet with that state's Republican candidate for governor, Linley Pearson. The Indiana gubernatorial candidate was curious about why the chairman of the RNC had such an urgent need to meet with him. He soon found out that it wasn't to congratulate him on his recent primary victory Yeuter told the Indiana candidate that he might lose the election to his Democratic opponent, Evan Bayh, the telegenic son of former Indiana senator Birch Bayh. It was going to be a difficult election. Bayh was extremely popular in the state, and any Republican challenger stood little chance of succeeding. Pearson wasn't convinced that defeat was certain, but Yeuter continued. If Pearson would step aside for the good of the party, in the next administration a person of his abilities would be a natural choice for a cabinet position, perhaps as commerce secretary.
The Indiana candidate was smart enough to know that if he bucked the party on what was obviously its top priority, campaign donations from corporations and top Republican supporters would dry up like a creek in August, and he would lose anyway. The unspoken message was that he wasn't going to be the governor of Indiana, but he could choose whether to take the easy road or the rocky one. Two weeks after he won the Indiana primary, securing his nomination as the Republican candidate for governor, Pearson announced that he was withdrawing from the race for "health and personal reasons" and that the Indiana Republican committee would select a candidate. The day before Pearson's announcement, Quayle was called to a meeting in the White House. Samuel Skinner, a golfing buddy of Quayle's and Bush's chief of staff, quickly got straight to the business at hand and told Quayle that Colin Powell was replacing him on the ticket.
The president had already agreed to the change, Quayle was told. "But there is an opportunity that you might want to be aware of," Skinner said, explaining that the next day the Republican nominee for governor in Indiana would be withdrawing from the race. "The state committee is hoping that you might be willing to bail them out of this tough spot by agreeing to run for the governor's seat," Skinner said, adding a patronizing, "It would be a good opportunity for you." After the meeting, Quayle placed several phone calls, trying to gather support from conservatives who had been his strongest supporters. But Skinner had been on the telephone the day before, laying the groundwork for the change. Although all of his supporters wished him the best and offered future help in any political campaign, no one was willing to intercede on his behalf. After a night's sleep, Quayle decided to follow the plan, which he correctly assumed had been orchestrated by Baker, and announce that he would remove himself from the Bush ticket to attempt to become governor of Indiana. As he watched Quayle's announcement on CNN, Baker couldn't resist a bit of gloating. "I've just signed Danny Quayle's death warrant," he laughed. "After he goes back to Indiana and loses to Bayh, ten years from now nobody will know who he is."
At campaign stops, Bush stuck to the story that Quayle had volunteered to leave the ticket and hadn't been pushed. After delivering a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce, Bush came the closest to allowing the story to crack in response to a critical question from a Quayle supporter. "You don't understand how difficult it is to make these decisions," Bush said. "It was Tension City in there. But you have to go forward. Dan Quayle made his own decision-it was his, I didn't tell him to do it, he's his own man-but now we can go forward and so can he." Bush-Powell turned out to be the dream team that the Republicans hoped that it would be. In the November election, Bush easily won reelection with 54 percent of the popular vote, to Clinton's 34 percent and Perot's 12 percent. But the upset of the election day was in Indiana, where Quayle surprised the pundits by defeating Bayh. This was the second time that Quayle had defeated a member of the Bayh family, having beaten Evan's father Birch Bayh for the Senate seat in 1980. In that election, the elder Bayh had reportedly dismissed his aides' suggestions that he needed to prepare for an upcoming debate, saying, "Come on, boys, don't bother me. I'm debating Danny Quayle."
This victory was just as sweet for Quayle. Quayle convinced William Kristol, who had been his chief of staff, to accompany him to Indiana for one year to get his administration off to a good start. Quayle, Kristol, and Quayle's lieutenant governor, Mitchell Daniels, a former Reagan White House political director, were able to assemble a staff of people from some of the brightest stars of conservative politics. As the national media checked in from time to time, expecting to write about Quayle's pratfall as the state's chief executive, they invariably returned to their editors empty-handed. Even Quayle's critics had to agree that the people in Indiana were pleased with the performance of their new governor.
As the 1996 election approached, Republicans assumed that Vice President Powell would be their nominee. But Powell was sincere in his dislike for politics, and he didn't have the voracious ambition required to become the nation's chief executive. In the middle of his term, Powell announced that he would not be a candidate for president under any circumstances. A few conservative Quayle supporters from his days in the Bush administration (including Kristol, who had returned to Washington as planned) began mentioning Quayle as a possible choice, but, like Powell, Quayle took himself out of consideration in 1995. This choice was well received in Indiana, where the popular governor easily won reelection. In 1996, the Republicans saw their sixteen-year hold on the presidency end when Democratic presidential nominee Albert Gore defeated Kansas senator and Republican nominee Robert Dole for the nation's highest office. That meant that once again the Republican field for the presidency was wide open for the 2000 race. That spring, as the first primary was about to begin, the one person most Republican conservatives were pinning their hopes on was the once-ridiculed vice president, Dan Quayle.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=25706
Here is the scenario:
What if George Bush had chosen a different running mate for the 1992 election? In June 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle surprised the nation by announcing, "I will not be a candidate for the vice presidential nomination." Over the electronic chirping of reporters punching in their office numbers on cell phones, Quayle continued: "This was my own decision , which I made after talking at length with my family. I have decided instead to enter the gubernatorial race for governor of my home state of Indiana." As the reporters began shouting questions, Quayle who had once described himself as "Dr. Spin"-attempted to explain the sudden change in plans. "I am from there, Marilyn is from there, and I would like my kids to experience growing up there, too. For too long my family and I have lived in the glare of the media spotlight here in Washington, and, quite frankly, we've suffered for it. I saw an opportunity to go back home and once again serve the people of my home state, and that's what I'm going to do. "It was my own decision," Quayle repeated. "Just mine and Marilyn's, and after I talked on the phone with President Bush yesterday and told him of my plans, he offered nothing but his highest support and best wishes."
Despite Quayle's carefully laid-out reasoning for leaving the Bush administration, the national media saw through the smoke. DAN DUMPED! screamed the headline of the New York Post the following morning. In fact, despite the concrete-solid denials of the Bush presidential campaign, Quayle had been dumped from the ticket. His days as vice president had become short from the time of Bush's less than strong performance in the spring Republican primaries, but it had taken vigorous machinations behind the scenes by Bush's top advisor, Secretary of State James Baker, to remove Quayle from the post he had clung to so tenaciously. Baker had never held much respect for Quayle's professional abilities, nor had the two men ever warmed to one another personally. Baker had first tried to convince Bush to drop Quayle from the ticket after Bush's poor showing in the New Hampshire primary early in 1992, telling him that with Quayle on board he could lose the fall election. "If you lose the election, your success in Iraq and in Panama won't matter," Baker had predicted. "A one-term presidency is always considered a failure, no matter what transpired during that time."
Baker had been able to cite several precedents of vice presidents being asked to step aside. Bush had been a part of Gerald Ford's administration when Ford had dropped Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in place of Kansas senator Bob Dole; FDR had substituted Henry Wallace for John Nance Garner in '40, and even Abraham Lincoln had replaced his first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, with Andrew Johnson in 1864. But despite the history lesson , Bush remained stubbornly loyal to Quayle. "Daaan Quaaaayle is up to the job, has a real handle on it. And he's learning more every day," Bush said. "I don't care if keeping him on puts us in deep doo-doo; I'm not gonna do it. Not gonna drop him like that."
But Baker and several other Bush cabinet officers, including Richard Cheney, the secretary of defense, and Lamar Alexander, secretary of education, were convinced that there was a possibility the Republicans could lose the fall election if something dramatic wasn't done to break the administration out of the doldrums that it had fallen into, and the most obvious solution to most people seemed to be to find a way to replace Quayle on the ticket. They had to find an alternative, one that was so attractive that it would overcome even Bush's stand. Baker, working with several members of the campaign committee, decided to approach the most popular person in the administration to serve with Bush. But Colin Powell wasn't interested. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had masterminded the military strategy that had overwhelmed the largest army in the Middle East, and following the Gulf War, he had scored approval ratings in the polls that were even higher than those of Bush. But while Bush had seen his poll numbers steadily decline to alarmingly low levels, Powell's had continued to float in the stratosphere.
Powell had little interest in politics, and on two separate occasions he rejected any suggestion that he replace Quayle on the Republican ticket. After Bill Clinton won the Democratic presidential nomination in the primaries, however, Bush's friend Cheney approached Powell a third time. "I don't blame you for not wanting to jump into politics," Cheney said. "It would be hard on your family, and hard on you. You'd spend all you days being told where to go and what to say instead of giving orders. It's an unpleasant duty." Cheney paused, letting the word "duty" hang in the air. "But look at it from another point of view. If Bush should happen to lose the election-I don't think he will, but it is a possibility-then that draft dodger Bill Clinton will be in the White House as commander in chief." Cheney paused again. Powell was a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, and there was no need to ask him how he felt about someone who had schemed so strenuously to avoid serving his nation.
Before Powell could respond, Cheney continued, "You created the Powell Doctrine: Go in with the force to do the job and do it right. No more fighting with a self-imposed disadvantage. The Powell Doctrine will change how America fights its battles for the next fifty years. Well, we need the Powell Doctrine here. We might win with the team we've got. But we might not. Why shouldn't we go into the fight with the best we have to offer?" As Cheney sat across from Powell, there was no indication in Powell's face that anything he had said had moved the general's position even an inch. Powell stared at Cheney with a furrowed brow, looking quite displeased that this arrangement had been presented to him a third time. "Okay, I'll do it," he said, his terse response making it clear that he wasn't going to be an enthusiastic candidate . With Powell agreeing to run with Bush on the fall ticket, the problem once again was Quayle. He could jump off the ticket or he could be pushed, but Baker knew that it would be easier for Quayle to make the jump if he had a soft place to land.
After a late-night meeting between Clayton Yeuter, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Rex Early, the Indiana chairman of the Republican Party, a plan was organized. Yeuter flew to Indiana to meet with that state's Republican candidate for governor, Linley Pearson. The Indiana gubernatorial candidate was curious about why the chairman of the RNC had such an urgent need to meet with him. He soon found out that it wasn't to congratulate him on his recent primary victory Yeuter told the Indiana candidate that he might lose the election to his Democratic opponent, Evan Bayh, the telegenic son of former Indiana senator Birch Bayh. It was going to be a difficult election. Bayh was extremely popular in the state, and any Republican challenger stood little chance of succeeding. Pearson wasn't convinced that defeat was certain, but Yeuter continued. If Pearson would step aside for the good of the party, in the next administration a person of his abilities would be a natural choice for a cabinet position, perhaps as commerce secretary.
The Indiana candidate was smart enough to know that if he bucked the party on what was obviously its top priority, campaign donations from corporations and top Republican supporters would dry up like a creek in August, and he would lose anyway. The unspoken message was that he wasn't going to be the governor of Indiana, but he could choose whether to take the easy road or the rocky one. Two weeks after he won the Indiana primary, securing his nomination as the Republican candidate for governor, Pearson announced that he was withdrawing from the race for "health and personal reasons" and that the Indiana Republican committee would select a candidate. The day before Pearson's announcement, Quayle was called to a meeting in the White House. Samuel Skinner, a golfing buddy of Quayle's and Bush's chief of staff, quickly got straight to the business at hand and told Quayle that Colin Powell was replacing him on the ticket.
The president had already agreed to the change, Quayle was told. "But there is an opportunity that you might want to be aware of," Skinner said, explaining that the next day the Republican nominee for governor in Indiana would be withdrawing from the race. "The state committee is hoping that you might be willing to bail them out of this tough spot by agreeing to run for the governor's seat," Skinner said, adding a patronizing, "It would be a good opportunity for you." After the meeting, Quayle placed several phone calls, trying to gather support from conservatives who had been his strongest supporters. But Skinner had been on the telephone the day before, laying the groundwork for the change. Although all of his supporters wished him the best and offered future help in any political campaign, no one was willing to intercede on his behalf. After a night's sleep, Quayle decided to follow the plan, which he correctly assumed had been orchestrated by Baker, and announce that he would remove himself from the Bush ticket to attempt to become governor of Indiana. As he watched Quayle's announcement on CNN, Baker couldn't resist a bit of gloating. "I've just signed Danny Quayle's death warrant," he laughed. "After he goes back to Indiana and loses to Bayh, ten years from now nobody will know who he is."
At campaign stops, Bush stuck to the story that Quayle had volunteered to leave the ticket and hadn't been pushed. After delivering a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce, Bush came the closest to allowing the story to crack in response to a critical question from a Quayle supporter. "You don't understand how difficult it is to make these decisions," Bush said. "It was Tension City in there. But you have to go forward. Dan Quayle made his own decision-it was his, I didn't tell him to do it, he's his own man-but now we can go forward and so can he." Bush-Powell turned out to be the dream team that the Republicans hoped that it would be. In the November election, Bush easily won reelection with 54 percent of the popular vote, to Clinton's 34 percent and Perot's 12 percent. But the upset of the election day was in Indiana, where Quayle surprised the pundits by defeating Bayh. This was the second time that Quayle had defeated a member of the Bayh family, having beaten Evan's father Birch Bayh for the Senate seat in 1980. In that election, the elder Bayh had reportedly dismissed his aides' suggestions that he needed to prepare for an upcoming debate, saying, "Come on, boys, don't bother me. I'm debating Danny Quayle."
This victory was just as sweet for Quayle. Quayle convinced William Kristol, who had been his chief of staff, to accompany him to Indiana for one year to get his administration off to a good start. Quayle, Kristol, and Quayle's lieutenant governor, Mitchell Daniels, a former Reagan White House political director, were able to assemble a staff of people from some of the brightest stars of conservative politics. As the national media checked in from time to time, expecting to write about Quayle's pratfall as the state's chief executive, they invariably returned to their editors empty-handed. Even Quayle's critics had to agree that the people in Indiana were pleased with the performance of their new governor.
As the 1996 election approached, Republicans assumed that Vice President Powell would be their nominee. But Powell was sincere in his dislike for politics, and he didn't have the voracious ambition required to become the nation's chief executive. In the middle of his term, Powell announced that he would not be a candidate for president under any circumstances. A few conservative Quayle supporters from his days in the Bush administration (including Kristol, who had returned to Washington as planned) began mentioning Quayle as a possible choice, but, like Powell, Quayle took himself out of consideration in 1995. This choice was well received in Indiana, where the popular governor easily won reelection. In 1996, the Republicans saw their sixteen-year hold on the presidency end when Democratic presidential nominee Albert Gore defeated Kansas senator and Republican nominee Robert Dole for the nation's highest office. That meant that once again the Republican field for the presidency was wide open for the 2000 race. That spring, as the first primary was about to begin, the one person most Republican conservatives were pinning their hopes on was the once-ridiculed vice president, Dan Quayle.