In 1992, a tough trip for Dan Quayle
By Felice Belman
GLOBE STAFF MARCH 13, 2015
In January 1992, just a month before New Hampshire’s cranky voters would go to the polls in the first-in-the-nation primary, President George H.W. Bush sent an emissary to do a campaign swing through the state on his behalf. Even if it hadn’t been the unpopular vice president, Dan Quayle, it would have been a tough assignment.
The state was still in the throes of a recession that had hit hard. A few months earlier, seven of the state’s banks had gone under. Unemployment was high. The state’s largest utility had filed for bankruptcy. And to top it off, Bush had broken his “no new taxes” pledge, so near to the hearts of New Hampshire residents. Was it any wonder some Republicans seemed drawn to Bush’s unlikely primary challenger, Patrick Buchanan?
On an arduous bus trip through nine North Country communities, Quayle tried hard to quell the discontent. “I’ve got your message. The president has got the message,” he told voters in Lisbon, Littleton, Woodsville, and beyond.
Along the way, he found both supporters eager for a gander at a VIP and skeptics eager to challenge him on nearly everything he said.
In Lincoln, one picketer’s sign said: “Dan Quayle, you’ll look fine in the unemployment line.”
At an Elks Club breakfast, a woman in the audience griped loudly about the state of the economy. “The only thing that’s going to help is leaders that don’t just cruise through every four years when there’s a primary,” she said.
Perhaps most disconcerting of all to the vice president: Outside the breakfast was the former governor of Massachusetts, Chub Peabody, who appeared to be interviewing a man in a yellow bird suit with the word “Quayle” on his back.
“You look more like a chicken than a quail,” Peabody told the bird through a bullhorn.
What in the world?
Peabody, it seemed, had put his name on the state’s unique vice presidential ballot. He wanted Quayle to do the same — and then agree to debate him.
The vice president was having none of it. He got in his campaign bus and rode on to the next event and the one after that, all the while trailed by Peabody and the chicken.
Probably just as well that Bush had stayed in Washington.
Felice Belman can be reached at felice.belman@globe.com.
Originally published at www.bostonglobe.com on March 12, 2015.
