Posted on 06/24/2007 11:43:15 AM PDT by paltz
Dan Quayle's moment of embarrassment. William Figueroa, 12, was the boy who knew how to spell "potato" even though the veep insisted on adding an "e" to the end.
Just the other night on television, Jay Leno was poking fun at some gaffe by George W. Bush, whose picture morphed into a photograph of Dan Quayle on the screen behind the comic.
Six years out of office with two failed presidential bids now behind him, ex Vice President Quayle still ranks as Americas favorite dumb politician because of what happened in Trenton on June 15, 1992.
Thats the day, you probably recall, a Trenton sixth grader had to teach the Vice President of the United States that potato is not spelled with an e on the end.
In his 1994 memoir, Quayle devotes a whole chapter to the events in a classroom at Trentons Munoz Rivera School and the impact of them on his career.
"It was a defining moment of the worst kind imaginable, Quayle wrote in the autobiography. "Politicians live and die by the symbolic sound bite.
Quayle ruefully reported on a Washington Post article that suggested the Trenton flub got such wide media play because "it seemed like a perfect illustration of what people thought about me anyway.
Less than five months after the incident, Quayle and President Bush were voted out of office, replaced by Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Ever since, the ex VP has been a straight-faced political joke.
To understand why, its important to know something about the way politics and the media work in America. "Image is all in politics, Quayle said, and the media not only project images, but also brings out any flaw in the picture.
Quayles image had been fodder for America comedians since the beginning, in 1988, when GOP presidential nominee George Bush tapped the 42-year-old Senator from Indiana as his VP.
When Quayle got on the victory podium with Bush for the first time at the GOP convention that summer someone remarked that he "looked like a guy who had just won a game show.
Quayle knew his boyish looks might hurt him and worked hard to present a studious image during the campaign. Despite a few blunders by Quayle, the Bush ticket prevailed in the election of 1988.
Days later, seeking to stifle the buzz in political circles that he was intellectually challenged, Quayle sat down with a group of top American political reporters for a televised two-hour discussion.
The newsmen, and many viewers, were left with the impression that, for all the jokes about him, the new vice president was a well-informed, politically savvy young man.
Through most of his term traveling the world to represent the president, meeting heads of state, giving speeches to all types of groups Quayle managed to avoid any serious gaffes. At least thats how he put it in his bio, Standing Firm.
June 15, 1992, started with Quayle flying out of Washington at 8:15 a.m. for a speech in New York that would be "about everything that was wrong with that city.
Quayle told the Manhattan Institute in a speech at the Waldorf-Astoria that New York was a mess because the liberal political policies of the past 40 years had failed.
In the book, Quayle said he knew little about his next stop, in Trenton, other than it was to help spotlight the citys Weed and Seed program, which still provides anti-drug education to grade schoolers while they also are being watched by adults until their parents get home from work.
When he got the Munoz Rivera School, Quayle spoke with some women involved in the program, saw a drill team perform and looked in on some self-esteem classes before his aides started hustling him off to another classroom for a staged spelling bee.
"What are we supposed to do? I asked Keith Nahigian, the advance man who had prepared this little photo op, Quayle wrote.
"Just sit there and read these words off some flash cards, and the kids will go up and spell them at the blackboard, the handler told the VP.
"Has anyone checked the card? another aide asked.
"Oh, yeah, responded Nahigian. "We looked at them and theyre just very simple words. No big deal.
Enter William Figueroa, 12, a sixth-grader from the Mott School in the South Ward who had been bused to Munoz Rivera to take part in the vice presidential event.
Figueroa knew how to spell potato, and he wrote it in a legible script on the blackboard when Quayle announced his word for the spelling bee.
Quayle looked at the blackboard, then at his contest card, and gently and quietly told the boy, "Youre close, but you left a little something off. The e on the end.
"So William, against his better judgment and trying to be polite, added an e and won applause for it from those assembled in the classroom, including Mayor Doug Palmer, Quayle wrote.
The misspelling wasnt mentioned until the end of the press conference afterward, when one reporter asked Quayle, "How do you spell potato?
"I gave him a puzzled look, and then the press started laughing. It wasnt until that moment that I realized anything was wrong, Quayle wrote.
"None of the staff people had told me. Caught off guard, I just rattled on a little to fill the air something about how I wasnt going to get into spelling matters but I knew something was really amiss.
Indeed. At about the time of the gaffe, in fact, The Trentonians night reporter was arriving at the office and hearing the editors plea for a story suitable for page 1.
"What are you talking about? Youve got the vice president in town today, the reporter said.
"You know Quayles not going to say anything newsworthy, the editor responded.
"Im not talking about his political message. Im saying watch for Quayle to foul up something, the reporter said.
Soon after, the reporter who had covered Quayles Trenton tour showed up in the newsroom and was ask how the event had gone.
He said Quayle delivered the usual political pap, prompting the night reporter to holler out, "Yeah, but what did he foul up?"
"Well, the reporter responded, "Quayle cant spell potato.
The editor had his front-page story, complete with the only media interview with Figueroa, who said the experience made him believe all the talk about the vice president being "an idiot.
Soon after the paper hit the streets, the scene in the Trenton classroom was playing on national television, just as Quayle had warned his wife it would be when he got home from Trenton the night before.
Comics loved it, and a staffer from the David Letterman Show called The Trentonian the morning after seeking help locating Figueroa so he could be invited on the show.
The next day, after his father sent him for a haircut and warned him to speak a bit more diplomatically about the vice president of the United State, Figueroa made his national television debut.
The Trenton kid wowed the Letterman audience. He told of the spelling bee, saying, "I knew he was wrong, but since hes the vice president I went back to the blackboard and put an e on the end and went back to my seat.
"Afterward, I went to the dictionary, and there was potato like I spelled it. Figueroa wouldnt call Quayle an "idiot again, in deference to his father, William Collazo, and Palmer, who had called the boys mother and warned that funds for Weed and Seed could be cut off if the VP got mad enough.
"I know hes not an idiot, he told the goading Letterman, "but he needs to study more. Do you have to go to college to be vice president?
From then on, the potato incident would become a campaign weapon for the Democrats backing Clinton and Gore. Figueroa was flown in to deliver the pledge of allegiance at the Democratic National Convention that summer.
Image-conscious Quayle laughed it off on the outside. But as his book indicates, he was fuming mad about the gaffe and blamed his aides for letting it happen and the press for exploiting it.
He referred to Gore saying in a speech that a leopard had changed it "stripes, and said if he had said that, "there would have been a week of Quayle jokes on the late-night shows and three dozen editorial cartoons set inside zoos.
The medias "obsession with my small verbal blunders went beyond the bounds of fairness, Quayle wrote in his book.
Now, fast forward five years to 1997, when The Trentonian decided to look up William Figueroa to see how he was doing after his hour of fame.
By then, he was a 17-year-old high school dropout who had fathered a child and was working a low-paying job at an auto showroom.
Quayle, Mr. Family Values, couldnt be reached for comment on what had become of his "potato nemesis. 1992: Gaffe with an 'e' at the end
Yet Jimmy Carter gets a Nobel. Go figure.
My, my, my. Somebody has issues, don’t they?
An excellent illustration of why the MSM is our most dangerous enemy. By selective reporting (i.e. propagandizing and censorship), they could make Albert Einstein look like Zippy the Pinhead.

Naah. He's a piker compared to these clowns.
I give the former VPOTUS credit...he is not out in the world telling every one else how to live, and what is wrong with the USA, like some past Presidents, and Vice Presidents
Made me wonder if Dan Quayle would have been given a fairer shake if the internet, fox, and talk radio emerged sooner while he was in office.
100,000 democrat gaffs = zero media reports
Guess that 10 to 1 stuffing of the media with dishonest democrat partisans pays off with massive manipulation of the public.
I thought potato with an e or without is correct
While potato is spelled this way now, it wasn’t always. Someone who reads some of the older literature might come across the ‘e’ spelling here and there. This might demonstrate that Quayle has spent significant time not only reading modern political and historical works but the cites and the cites of the cites. It is not easy to come down instantly from that level to that of the contemporaneous reporter at every PR photo-op stop.
It sounds like William Figueroa turned out to be one of the weeds. I wonder how that Weed and Feed program is going now? Everybody knows a government program never dies.
I remember this - Quayle putting an ‘e’ on the end of potato was turned into a scandal worse than Watergate.
Damn good question (i.e., maybe / maybe not / beats me). I’m certain that without the Internet, the TANG forgeries would have denied President Bush a second term.
Dan Quayle was more qualified than the articulate and clean Barack Hussein Obama Jr.
"Tom Morrow..Tom Morrow..I luv yah Tom Morrow your only a Dago Weigh.."
Of course Tony wouldn't like the reference to his girth. He would reply without Mirth!
Bada Bing!! Your Thighness!
Fireworks is spelled with an “e” too, Trentonian.
Yes, the teacher’s card had the misspelling “potatoe”. The big picture — as the article suggests, in a waye — is that the student learned well from the media’s lessons of that day. He learned that Dan Quayle and his ideas were objects of derision. Therefore the child-now-man fathers children Murphy Brown style. Zippless F*kily.
Q1. Is "Standing Firm" the best title for a book, especially when people are already laughing at you?
Q2. How did he get his current job? (From Wikipedia: Dan Quayle is Chairman of an international division of Cerberus Capital Management, a multi-billion dollar hedge fund) Aren't hedge funds supposed to be run by brilliant financiers?
I never heard gore’s faux pa about the “leopards stripes”, imagine that?
That was my understanding. The article mentions the fact he was using flash cards. Hell, he was reading the words from something already printed, he wasn’t just grabbing them out of the air.
Will the media ever mark the anniversary of Shiela Jackson Lee asking the scientists to move the Mars rover over to show where the American astronauts planted the flag?
That shows a deeper disconnect with history and significance.
How about the anniversary of Al Gore Junior’s claim of having invented the internet? Oh wait, he says he only suggested it. Must’ve been while he was in Vietnam staring down the end of his own rifle because Usenet goes back DECADES.
Then again, the TAKS test was formerly called the TASK test and I am of the mind some educrat misspelled and we got stuck with the new term.
No, seriously, I want to know why anybody, even the nuttiest lefty, gives enough of a damn about that episode fifteen years later to give it anything more than a couple of lines in “This Day in History”. It’s not as if there’s nothing more timely to report on.
Dan Quayle, Ted “Chap Acquitted” Kennedy and Bill Jefferson Clinton are all entered in a 3 man spelling bee. Who wins?
Answer: Dan Quayle—he was the only one to know that “harass” was only one word.
So the editor was looking for a gaffe before he had one. That says it all about these biased scum in the liberal media.
Better than being voted Prom Queen like some VP candidates:

You can't call John Edwards a silly f****t without being sent to rehab but the press can call George H.W. Bush a "wimp" and talk up how the "wimp factor" is ruining his campaign.
Moreover, Conservatives, generally, should have rallied around Quayle, when he spoke out against the media's effort to make having babies out-of-wedlock seem acceptable, in a popular television series--which incidentally was followed by other examples of the same conditioning efforts in other series. It is by stigmatizing socially deleterious conduct that a healthy society protects itself.
Their highlight was looking for a gaffe. Rather than cutting the salient point from any of the day’s speeches, they instead ignored his message and went on a superficial attack.
No different than what the press does in Frank Capra’s film when Mr. Smith first goes to Washington and they get him to pose for some photos for the press that are then given a series of insulting captions.
If Bush’s political advisers had been savvy, they would’ve seized upon this method of reporting and had candidate Bush deliberately fumble on his key statements. They may sound bite his speech but the public would still hear his message.
He got thrown under the bus. With the faces in the room all laughing at him, he should’ve turned the card around, shown it to the cameras, and used his pointing finger (middle) to stress that was what was on the card.
He would’ve forever lost the teachers’ union but that vote wasn’t his to begin with.
Well, whose fault is that? He should have invented it, like that other VP did.
Quayle was right about Murphy Brown, and his critics wrong. Liberalism is a cancer that eats the soul...
The conclusion of the article almost seems to imply a connection between Quayle's shortcomings and Figueroa's not-so-hot outcome.
Watergat.
I have a question for you. Is the failure to properly spell “Potato(e)” a disqualifier if you wish to be a financier?
When it became evident Dan Quayle’s wife towered over him intellectually, the term “overmarried” entered the national vocabulary.
“Aren’t hedge funds supposed to be run by brilliant financiers?”
If you can’t be brilliant, famous works just as well. See Chelsea Clinton.
The Liberal Media were going always out to make Quayle look like an idiot. It happened to be the "Potato/Patatoe" Incident, but it easily could have been something else. When he referred to Murphy Brown the Liberal Media claimed he thought the character was a real person. Clearly he was referring to the show, but all that matter was making him out to be an idiot.
On the bright side, I feel that Conservatives have learned from this incident. Always remember that the Liberal Media is your enemy. If a similar incident happened now I feel that Conservatives would defend the attacked Conservative and point out the shallowness of the attack.
Seriously.
Yes. I'd vote for him before any of the other "Republican" front-runners.
The singular spelling variants potato vs. potatoe co-existed into the 19th century. Potatoe in the 20th century came to be considered a misspelling, while the plural remains potatoes.
Good catch.
I’m heartened by the comments of many here who did learn the right lessons from Dan’s Debacle. We’ve seen that some sincere and honorable men are their own worst enemies when they speak (especially extemporaneously), and some “world-class a$$holes” are as smooth and glib as, well as used car salesmen.
Repeal is correct in that we (any of us, but especially our public representatives) should NEVER trust the drive-by media.
Anibody hoo onsly nos won vay too spel a wort ‘as know emagenation!
Funny, I just met VP Dan Quayle briefly a couple of weeks ago. He seems to be thriving well in private enterprise.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.