I am writing this on the morning following an event of great national shock. The Republicans have chosen Dan Quayle as the Vice-Presidential candidate. Quayle is a young man, 41, and part of the interpretation is that the party wants to appeal to the Baby Boomer generation. This is a colossal miscalculation in this commentator's opinion. I know. I am from the Baby Boomer generation myself. (Okay, let's say late in the Baby Boomer generation, very, very late, okay?) I can tell you most of this generation are people who are getting along but haven't hit it big. Some of us even ride garbage trucks or clerk in stores. It's not going to appeal to us to see that had we played our cards differently we could have been Vice-Presidential candidates by now. That's more for people maybe twenty years or so older, we tell ourselves. Now this thing happens and every Baby Boomer has to face the fact that some slob our age--or in my case somewhat over--is making it big. And there are other similarities. Quayle's family owned newspapers. My family owned newspapers. The difference is my family kept ours stacked under the cellar steps; his family published them, so didn't have to keep them under the steps. In any case, this is all very sobering news and I hope the Republicans are prepared for the kind of backlash they will get from us politically-aware Baby Boomers. Mark R. Leeper {ed What I want to know is, what's Quayle got against Canada?? If he wanted to dodge the war, we have a perfectly good country up here he could have visited. Does he have a secret foreign policy agenda we don't know about? }
(From the "Rest" of RHF)