Dan Quayle - Worth Fighting for

DAN QUAYLE

WORTH
FIGHTING
FOR

Worth Fighting For. Copyright 1999 by Dan Quayle. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published in association with Sealy M. Yates, literary agent, Orange, California.

Book design by Mark McGarry
Set in Fairfield

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Quayle, Dan, 1947
Worth fighting for / by Dan Quayle.
p. cm
ISBN 0849916022
1. United StatesPolitics and government1993
2. United StatesSocial conditions1980 . I. Title.
E885Q39 1999
973.929dc21

9929541
CIP

Printed in the United States of America.

99 00 01 02 03 04 BVG 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Marilyn, Tucker, Benjamin, and Corinne

Contents

My 1994 memoir, Standing Firm, ended with the assertion, I have much yet to do. This book lays out in detail what I think the next president must do.

Since leaving the vice presidency in 1993, I have moved twice, first from Washington, D.C., to Indianapolis, and then from Indianapolis to Phoenix. This latter move came about because Marilyn and I wanted to be close to my parents as my fathers health began to fail.

Ive also watched my household shrink. Two of my children have graduated from collegeTucker from Lehigh and Ben from Duke. My youngest, Corinne, is also gone from the house most of the year as she nears the end of her undergraduate studies. Tucker is working in China with a multinational company, and Ben has been accepted to law school. We watch our childrens lives with the same mixture of pride and wonder that all parents feel.

While family has been my highest priority, Ive also been busy on many other fronts. Ive written two previous books, helped found an investment company, sat on several corporate boards, served as a trustee of the Hudson Institute, and taught graduate business students the realities of competitive politics. The teaching experience has perhaps been the most enjoyable of all. I taught for two years at Thunderbird, the American Graduate School of International Management. About one-third of the students were from abroad. Thunderbird, like many business schools, requires its students to acquire some work experience between their undergraduate and graduate studies. As a result, my students were not only dedicated and smart, they had also been in the real world of work for at least a few years.

These students were deeply interested in the course and the reading, but some of them displayed a genuine discontent with politics itself. Like many people in our country, they are simply turned off by politics, choosing not to participate at all in the selection of our leaders. This is true in the coffee shops of Main Street and in living rooms throughout America. Reversing this decline in civic participation is a huge challenge for the nation.

When book deadlines and classroom commitments have allowed, I have also spent a good part of the past six years traveling to support men and women who are struggling to keep America true to its highest principles and its founding ideals. Marilyn and I have crisscrossed the country to support causes and candidates pledged to the principles of freedom, faith, and family. That has meant a lot of time in airplanes and hotels, but we have been happy to work as hard as we could to make a difference.

Unfortunately, the efforts we and millions of others have made have been only partly successful. Often we have worked in vain. America on the eve of a new century is much coarser than it was a decade ago and increasingly transfixed by profits and portfolios. Astonishingly, many people think the only statistic that matters is the gross domestic product. Increasingly, American elites appear willing to leave large numbers of their fellow citizens behind as the stock market lifts them into higher income brackets.

I am not.

Earlier this year I gave a talk in Manchester, New Hampshire, where I discussed my unease with a culture absorbed in its own net worth even as many millions are working harder and longerand still feeling that they are barely coping with bills and all the demands of family and community. I explained that I saw an America in cultural decline even as its surface prosperity dazzled the world. I also noted that the pillars of American securitymilitary preparedness and a common attachment to shared idealswere badly damaged.

A woman came up through the crowd to thank me and to tell me that she sensed in my remarks something different from what she had heard from a dozen presidential candidates she had encountered in the past. What she sensed is that my campaign is rooted in the reality of America on the brink of the twenty-first century. Ive started a business, hassled with health insurance carriers, arranged for the long-term care of an infirm parent, and watched my children react to the culture around them. Mixed into these ordinary experiences of life have been some extraordinary opportunities to meet with leaders in the international business and political communities. Three times, for example, I have visited China and met that countrys senior leaders, including President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongi.

In sum, even as my life since January 1993 has been very much like yours, it has also been a period of continuing engagement in the world of international events.

It would have been easy to stay on the sidelines and enjoy the undeniable benefits of being a former vice president. I suppose I could have continued my service on corporate boards, played in a pro-am golf tournament every week, and generally eased into the new decade in a position of comfort and relative security.

I simply cannot do that. I care deeply about this country and its people in a way that midwesterners have always done: openly and unashamedly. That love will not allow me to sit out the most important campaign in a generation. Not since 1980 have the stakes been this high. Because I unhesitatingly urge my children and students to involve themselves in the effort to guide Americas future, so I am compelled to do the same. And that means running for president.

The challenges ahead are hugely complex but also, in a real way, very simple. The reading I assign my classes underscores the complexity, whether its I. M. Destlers American Trade Politics, Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munros The Coming Conflict with China, Hedrick Smiths The Power Game, Kenneth T. Walshs Feeding the Beast, or any of several other titles. The demands of politics, economics, and national security combine to make Americas difficulties seem almost intractable. But I am continually refreshed by my constant encounters with real Americans who are working, often without pay or recognition, to resolve the countrys most pressing problems. Thats the simple truth: Americas greatness continues to reside not in her wealth or her military prowess but in her wonderful people.

I am willing to run this race with all of its challenges, its promise of fatigue, and its certainty of low blows and cheap shots, because millions of Americans are trying to return this country to its highest calling. Even as a few voices have called it quits and urged a retreat from a political arena that they regard as beyond repair, still the rest of us must continue the effort to hold America to its ideals.