Trust Not Your Handlers

Dear Gov. Palin: Congratulations on having survived your introduction to national politics. You left nothing to be desired as you spoke the lines that your handlers in the McCain campaign gave you. Those lines, however, are the kind that would turn almost anyone into Dan Quayle. The following is to warn you against the substance-free, image politics that your handlers practice. To make the contribution to our country that you seem able to make, and to retain your integrity, you must lead the Republican Party's so-called professionals -- not be led by them. So here is an object lesson. I knew Dan Quayle, and you're no Dan Quayle. As a matter of fact, neither was Dan Quayle the byword for unseriousness that he became from the moment he started running for vice president. A good politician, he beat Indiana's towering political figure Birch Bayh in 1980. In the Senate, he did his homework. On missile defense, I found his mind agile and his judgment sound. Attractive in every way, he was a logical choice for Vice President. His fatal mistake was to regard the handlers that George Bush gave him as his superiors and teachers, as men he had to please. Even after the American people elected him, he still thought that the likes of Jim Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Dick Darman outranked him in every way. Whereas in fact they were hirelings with no political base, he saw himself as working for them. Even after Quayle hired a staff that was intellectually far superior to Bush's -- people who were to be listened to because of the substance of what they said rather than because of the jobs they held -- Quayle still lacked the intellectual and political confidence to think and speak for himself. That explains his now famous "deer caught in the headlights" look: it is the look that comes naturally upon anyone who is trying to speak as someone else wants him to, who is trying to imitate, to say things he only half believes. Doing that is very, very hard, and demeaning. As a professor, ...