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Dan Quayle: one of the few men in politics capable of making Dubya look like a genius by comparison.
It was frightening to imagine that idiot filling the highest office in the land, but try as Democrats did, we couldn't get much traction on the "heartbeat away" argument, in trying to convince voters that a vote for the Bush/Quayle ticket was a vote for taking an unacceptable chance of putting a complete idiot in charge. (George Sr. may have been many things, but an idiot like his son, or like Quayle, wasn't one of them.)
Of course, judging by how George Jr. "won" twice twelve years later, Republicans must have been very eager to get a complete idiot into the White House for a long time, and were merely settling for an idiot-in-waiting when they voted Bush/Quayle.
Can we make the "heartbeat away" argument sink in this time? McCain is no spring chicken, and death in office is hardly that remote a possibility, even if McCain is in reasonably good health for his age now.
If McCain picks someone like Huckabee, for instance -- beloved by Christian zealots, and "charming" to those who don't know him well enough to know he's a nutjob who'd like to redo the Constitution to match the Bible -- will we be able to effectively scare independents and moderate Republicans away from a McCain/Huckabee ticket?
There seems to be a strange effect where VP picks only help a candidate, by appeasing some faction or demographic, but never hurt that much no matter how bad the VP would be as the actual President.
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