No Dandy Dan (Quayle) Dancing with the Stars
Speaking of vice presidential picks, in this the 20th anniversary month of Sen. Dan Quayle's selection as the No. 2 presidential partner for Republican George H. W. Bush, we have official word from Quayle headquarters in Arizona.
The report that Quayle will dance his way across the stage in a pretend competition with other people who used to be sort-of famous for something else is an unfounded rumor.
According to a very polite and patient Quayle assistant, who was answering a stream of calls in the Scottsdale heat, the nation's 44th vice president was indeed invited to appear on the TV show and never even seriously considered it.
"We get all kinds of crazy requests for him to do things," she said. "He's busy with his work."
Apparently, if you can imagine such a thing, some show biz publicity types invite a famous person to appear, knowing full well they won't, and then leak erroneous word to celebrity writers just to get people to talk about their show. Judging by this item, it works.
Quayle, the last vice presidential nominee to be announced during the actual nominating convention, is chairman of an international division of Cerberus Capital Management, the giant multi-billion-dollar fund that now controls Chrysler and GMAC Financial Services, among many other things in many places, which is what you can do when you control billions of dollars.
So what about Walter Mondale? Is he available to merengue, a dance that not many people know wasn't invented by a more recent vice president?
--Andrew Malcolm
Photo credit: Associated Press
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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"He's busy with his work."
Other than the money thing, what else does he do? I didn't know he was still alive until now.
Posted by: The Holywriter | August 19, 2008 at 08:08 PM
Dancing is one of my hobbies and I think there's some confusion about the names of various dance moves. The merengue is a type of dance, yes, but it is totally different than the dance I believe you were referring to, which is Al Gore's macarena.
Posted by: S. Good | August 21, 2008 at 10:48 PM