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Dan Quayle

Poor Danny. Folks make fun of him, and yet he tries so hard. The little tyke had his heart set on being President, but nobody took him seriously, so he quit the race. He became the first Vice President to lose his party's nomination since Alben Barkley in 1952. Oh, well. Just one more embarrassment to add to his list.

Danny gets a little befuddled at times. We all know he can't spell and that he thought folks in Latin America speak Latin. But just remember what he told the United Negro College Fund: "what a waste it is to lose one's mind." No, I think it's "what's losing a mind when you're wasted." Right?

OK, so Danny's not the brightest guy and wasn't the top student in his school. His own father said his main school interests were "broads and booze." And look where it got him. Did the valedictorian in his graduating class become Vice President of the United States? No-o-o-o. But little J. Danforth did.

He didn't have the easiest time being Vice President. He got confused, tripped over words, stepped into minefields. Take abortion, for example. Like most Republicans, Danny is strongly against it. But when Larry King asked him what he would do if his 13-year-old daughter got pregnant, Danny said he'd support her decision if she wanted to abort.

Oh, no, his wife, Marilyn, said. She would have that baby, regardless. Aw, Ma! Dad said I could. Poor kid. You can't pick your parents.

But when confronted with someone else's kid, it's a different story. Danny once told an 11-year-old she should have her baby despite the fact her father raped her. "You're a very strong woman. Though this would be a traumatic experience that you would never forget, I think you would be very successful in life." An 11-year-old woman? Danny, you're no Dear Abby. Even if they ask for your advice, just say you don't know.

His wife's even more conservative than he is. Her family has been known to sit around the house listening to tapes from a Texas preacher who rants about feminists and gays.

After they left Washington in 1993, she and her sister wrote a book -- a political thriller called Enter the Serpent. It's about how Democrats are evil, and it has a phallic symbol in the title -- but there's no sex scenes. What's up with that?

Back during the 1992 campaign, Danny caught flak for attacking Murphy Brown. Now he feels vindicated. After running for only ten years, the show was finally canceled, and now family values have become the GOP's political mantra. They rarely miss a chance to inject "family values" into a conversation because it has become the polite way of saying "we don't like gays" without coming right out and saying it.

Like Bill Clinton, Danny once had his own Paula problem. In 1980, then-Congressman Danny and two of his Congressional buds spent a weekend golfing in Florida. Word leaked out that a lobbyist, a hot babe named Paula Parkinson, had stayed with them. Then they got in trouble after all three voted on a bill the way she wanted them to.

Paula, a former Playboy model, said she had sex with Danny. But Marilyn came to the rescue, saying, "anyone who knows Dan Quayle knows he'd rather play golf than have sex any day."

What about croquet, Marilyn? How does sex with you stack up against that? What about badminton? Or having one's root canal scraped?