The Revenge of the Nerds Is Quayle’s Triumph : The debates: The ‘in crowd’ is out, and he’s winning points and applause--if not many votes--for conservative issues.

There is no greater measure of the deep, deep trouble in which this Administration finds itself than the fact that less than three weeks before Election Day, Dan Quayle managed to have a better debate night than his boss did. Even though the vice president started out like a college kid who has overdosed on amphetamines in preparation for the final exam, when he finally calmed down he actually had something coherent to say--which is more than could be said for his boss. This yielded the big news out of the vice presidential debate: Dan Quayle isn’t an idiot after all.

Proving that one is not a moron, however, is not the stuff of which election victories are made. Election victories are made or lost on the record of the incumbent. Once past the fireworks, the most interesting thing about Quayle’s performance Tuesday was how it illustrated the Administration that could have been.

Think of the White House as you would think of your average American high school. There is the “in crowd”; they wear fashionable clothes and hold the good parties. In the White House, the “in crowd” are the ones closest to the President. On domestic policy, this crowd was led by Chief of Staff John Sununu and Budget Director Richard Darman.

In your typical American high school, everyone strives to get in with the “in crowd.” This was true of a group of conservatives both inside and outside the White House who attempted to formulate for Bush a post-Reagan-era conservative domestic policy.

In the debate, Dan Quayle showcased some of the most important pieces of this new conservative domestic policy. He got a spontaneous round of applause when he advocated school choice and asked Al Gore, “What about supporting parents to send kids to schools of their choice?” In every political audience I have watched this year, school choice--whether it is the public-school choice favored by the Democrats or the voucher plan favored by the Republicans--has never failed to bring spontaneous applause. When Quayle talked about cities Tuesday, he talked about a Jack Kemp program to bring home ownership to the urban poor. Last January in New Hampshire, Bill Clinton praised Kemp’s home-ownership programs to an audience of Democrats and got one of those eager bursts of applause that politicians love so much. And on the question of the family, Dan Quayle finally got it right: The crisis of the American family isn’t among the yuppie Murphy Browns of the world but among very poor teen-agers in communities where gangs have become the best available replacement for absent families.

But let’s go back to high school. The bleeding-heart conservatives (as they’ve been called) who thought about these programs tried repeatedly to get the President to focus on them. They ended up fighting the “in crowd” on matters big and small, from the disastrous 1990 budget deal to a modest proposal in the wake of the Los Angeles riots to establish a Civilian Conservation Corps for inner-city youth. Occasionally, when they had a Cabinet secretary such as Kemp or Lamar Alexander with them, they got legislation into Congress. But without the backing of the “in crowd,” the legislation was doomed. From time to time, leaders of the “in crowd,” such as Budget Director Darman, would even go so far as to publicly ridicule their ideas.

We know what eventually happens in high school. The geeks and the misfits stop trying; they get together in their own little group and decide that they are, after all, better off not being in the “in crowd.” Frozen out of an inner circle that decided, in the wake of the Gulf War, that George Bush didn’t need to have a domestic policy to win reelection, the bleeding-heart conservatives and Dan Quayle (who had been an embarrassment to the “in crowd” since the day he was chosen as vice president) started to hang out together.

In what are probably the last days of the Bush presidency, the “in crowd” is engaging in a disgusting display of blaming each other for the failure of their Administration. Furthermore, they have all been told that, should a miracle happen and the Bush/Quayle ticket wins, they will no longer be invited to the best parties.

Dan Quayle’s debate performance won’t change the course of this election, but it will be a scene in a history known as the revenge of the nerds.