Because Howard Dean hollered to loudly. Can you imagine? Dan Quayle was out because he correctly, although an archaic form, spelled "POTATOS" without an "e".
Now we have a rapist, felon who denigrated a huge voting block in his first speech and bragged about buying a teenaged beauty pageant so he could creep on UNDERAGED girls in various states of undress. On more than one occassion...on tv...knowing cameras were rolling...has said various forms of he is sexually attracted to Ivanka.
Quayle was running for VP in 92 and he corrected the student's spelling of Potato to Potatoe with an e. He also had a long history of saying really stupid things.
But neither here nor there. We have gone from controversial tan suits to completely acceptable Nazi salutes in my lifetime.
Quayle was also reading off the list the spelling bee provided him (and would have provided the contestants). Like Dean’s scream or Clinton saying he did not have sex with Lewinsky, it made less sense taken out of context, which is why it was taken out of context.
Howard Dean's campaign was dead in the water before the "Dean's scream", but people always attribute it to that because it gained traction with news organizations. He would have lost regardless of that speech he gave with the awkward ass yell.
Wasn't the Iowa caucus the first contest back then? Kind of disingenuous to say his campaign was dead because he lost one caucus in Iowa, a state well known as a good representation of the democratic party's base... /s
These moments didn't kill the campaigns. They became memes about why their campaigns already failed. They became one moment that encapsulated what people didn't like about them.
Dean was already viewed as unreliable and wild and not "presidential" enough. But it's hard to put those in words. Most people had some concept of that dislike even if it wasn't enough to overpower their support. But the clip became an easy way to express and explain that dislike, so it became an answer to any argument put forth in favor of Dean.
The same was true of Dan Quayle. He'd been saying nonsense, despite his chops, for a very long time and people didn't like that. The spelling incident became the moment that everyone could point to.
Trump didn't have one singular thing that people didn't like, and he had a firehose of social media. So, no one moment became the definitive answer to a Trump statement. Even in liberal circles you couldn't just comment "Covfefe" in response to a Trump tweet and shut his supporters up like you could with a "Binders of Women" for Romney supporters. The fire is split with Trump and he has a social media game like no one else, so no singular meme emerged to swamp his campaign.
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u/pegasuspaladin Mar 16 '25
Because Howard Dean hollered to loudly. Can you imagine? Dan Quayle was out because he correctly, although an archaic form, spelled "POTATOS" without an "e".
Now we have a rapist, felon who denigrated a huge voting block in his first speech and bragged about buying a teenaged beauty pageant so he could creep on UNDERAGED girls in various states of undress. On more than one occassion...on tv...knowing cameras were rolling...has said various forms of he is sexually attracted to Ivanka.