BYE BYE, MR SMALL POTATOE

Mark Steyn looks long and hard

for a Republican rival to George Dubya

New Hampshire 'GOOD to see you, Mark,' said Dan Quayle, and looked me straight in the eye. Then he looked deep in my eyes. And deeper still, his twinkling baby blues light- ing up the darkest recesses of my soul.

If he'd been anyone other than Dan Quayle, I'd have sworn the guy was coming on to me. But he is Dan Quayle and, even though he was talking about something called 'unfunded man dates', er, 'man- dates', and it was a sticky 98 degrees in the un-airconditioned Masonic hall and we were all feeling a little groggy, it seemed more likely that he'd been advised to do the eye-contact thing because it's supposed to be forceful and presidential.

So, for want of anything better to do, I stared back at him. He stared into me even more intensely. I reciprocated. And, for what seemed like an eternity, there we were, eyeball to eyeball. I don't know what he was hoping to find round the back of my optic nerves, but I know what I was looking for: I was trying to see whether the former vice-president really, honestly, seriously believes there's any conceivable scenario — George W. Bush gets struck by lightning, Elizabeth Dole turns out to be moonlight- ing as a lesbian lap-dancer in Atlantic City, anything — that will result in him standing up in January 2001 and saying, 'I, J. Dan- forth Quayle, do solemnly swear. . . Eventually, after campaign aides prised our eyeballs apart, he said that he's the only candidate who can put back together the old Reagan coalition of fiscal conserva- tives, social conservatives and national- defence conservatives. But every Republican candidate says that. I'd like to know whether, deep down, he's thinking, like everyone else, 'C'mon, man, you're Dan Quayle. It's never gonna happen.'

Now, I'm not one of those people who think Dan Quayle's a joke. During his troubled vice-presidency, when every third-rate hack was living high off the hog on lame-brain Quayle gags, I eschewed them. Even the `potatoe' business wasn't entirely his fault: it was the end of the day, he was tired and, on the answer-sheet in front of him, the schoolteacher had written the word with an 'e'. Alas, you can get rid of vice-presidents more easily than tenured grade-school teachers. Six years on, he looks great — mature, distinguished, grey- ing at the temples, perfectly presidential. 'What an absolute dish!' said Darlene, the wife of my town's Republican chairman. The once-mocking national media have now decided he's an intellectual heavy- weight: at the time of his famous attack on 'Murphy Brown', a fictional character in a sitcom, for setting a bad example by having a child out of wedlock, he was derided as a squaresville loser out of touch with the Zeitgeist; now everyone — Republican or Democrat — talks about family values and Mr Quayle is credited in New York and Washington with being ahead of the curve.

Unfortunately for the intellectual colos- sus, no New York or Washington media were present on Saturday when he flew up from Long Island for a rally in my neigh- bouring town. Instead, there was a reporter from WNTK radio in Lebanon, New Hampshire, who looks barely old enough to remember the Quayle vice-pres- idency. 'You say you're running for Presi- dent,' she began accusingly, as if he was just some fellow who'd wandered in off the street and begun talking about defence spending. 'What I want to know is, are you a liberal, a conservative or an ultra-conser- vative?' Apparently, these were the three categories she had on her tick-sheet.

'Er, I'm a conservative,' said Mr Quayle, disappointing many in the crowd.

'What do you think the crucial issue in the 2000 election is?' I asked my neigh- bour Tom during a break.

. he's got his father's money.' 'No question about it,' he said. 'It's where he stands on Waco.'

'Really?' I said.

'Yeah. The new evidence showing that the Feds deliberately started the fire in the compound.... I want to know Quayle's position on that.'

'Absolutely,' I said. As I left, the former vice-president was listening to Tom explain why Attorney-General Janet Reno should be indicted for murder.

Six years ago, the secret service boys would have blown away a guy like Tom — long white hair and beard, a T-shirt embla- zoned with the Second Amendment on the right to bear arms — if he'd tried to get within a hundred yards of the Vice-Presi- dent. But ex-Veeps don't have secret ser- vice protection (even in a country whose citizens require little motivation to open fire on each other, no one has yet thought it worth the effort to take out a vice-presi- dent). You're a heartbeat from the presi- dency and then suddenly you're a million miles away again, trying to figure out a way back.

Barring a last-minute surprise, the Quayle candidacy will expire in the days after 14 August, when the presidential 'straw poll' is taken in Ames, Iowa. The Iowa straw poll is a warm-up for the Iowa caucus, which is a warm-up for the New Hampshire primary, which is a warm-up for the compressed primary season of next spring. To those who say presidential poli- tics is just about money, the Iowa straw poll responds: you bet! You have to pay $25 to vote in it, which would normally be a disin- centive. But, happily, the candidates outbid each other to hire you to vote for them.

Mrs Bobbie Gobel, the garrulous head of Iowa's Christian Coalition, runs an employ- ment agency in Des Moines and claims that billionaire candidate Steve Forbes offered her a contract to supply temps to turn up in Ames and vote for him. George W. Bush calls himself the 'compassionate conserva- tive', but Steve was supposedly offering $7 an hour — that's two bucks above minimum wage, and compassionate enough to prompt stories about vast tides of migrant workers crossing the Rio Grande and heading north: the residency requirements for vot- ing in the Iowa poll are about as rigorous as those for running in the New York Senate race. Nonetheless, Mrs Gabel turned down the Forbes deal: 'I'd rather burn a bridge than burn my country,' she says.

She wants Steve to get out of the race to make way for more 'godly' candidates. She herself is refusing to get out of the way: the national Christian Coalition (which Forbes has spent a lot of time kissing up to) has sacked Mrs Gobel and the entire Iowa board over her indiscreet remarks, but she's staying put. 'Bobbie Gobel's not going any- where,' she insists. Meanwhile, Steve is mak- ing do with just one temp: it's rumoured that Mrs Thatcher has agreed to put in an appearance in Ames (at rather more than seven bucks an hour, one assumes). If you're from less developed political cultures such as Britain, you probably think that a poll in which the candidates hire their voters doesn't mean very much. But current wisdom in Washington is that the Iowa straw poll is a far better indicator of long-term presidential prospects than the old-fashioned retail politics of the New Hampshire primary. A good showing in the Granite State proves nothing more than that you've spent long hours slogging around dreary small towns persuading a bunch of unrepresentative crazies that You're nuts enough to be worth voting for — as Pat Buchanan did in 1996. But how many voters you can afford to buy in Iowa IS a crucial test of whether you'll be able to pile up enough dough to fund expensive attack-ad campaigns on your opponents in California and the other big states. George Dubya has the best part of $50 million in the bank right now, Steve Forbes is rich enough to run his candidacy for as long as he wants, and everyone else needs a good second-place showing in Iowa or their abil- ity to raise enough money to stay in the race will be seriously impaired. On the other hand, you don't want to be seen to be spending money with nothing to Show for it: only 12,000 or so voters partic- ipate in the Iowa poll, but, last time round, Phil Gramm spent $800,000 courting them and in the end performed so badly he Withdrew from the race a few weeks later.

So now Dan Quayle says the poll is irrel- evant and Senator John McCain says he's `boycotting' it. But the rest of the gang are pulling out all the stops. Gary Bauer is fly- ing in the Christian pop group 4HIM; Utah Senator Orrin Hatch is bringing in his neighbours Donny and Marie Osmond — Iowa has 16,000 Mormons, so, if Donny and Marie can draw 1,200 of them to Ames, the stiff-necked Mormon Senator figures he'll have ten per cent of the vote to begin with.

Whether Donny and Marie are that big a draw even in the Mormon quartier of Iowa is a moot point. You could make the case that, these days, Senator Hatch is a bigger name in the music business: he's written songs for several best-selling Chris- tian country albums; Gladys Knight has recorded his tribute to Mother Teresa and the Princess of Wales; and he still hasn't given up hope that Barbra Streisand might One day record the love song he wrote for Ted Kennedy and his second wife: We are souls along the way,

In my heart you stay, You know my secrets, I have cried your pain. . . .

Still, for some reason, it's an Osmond song that Orrin Hatch's campaign brings to mind. The Senator could conceivably be president but not until the 'Twelfth of Never' — and, as Donny shrewdly observed in his 1973 hit single, 'that's a long, long time'. Yet Dubya's team are taking no chances. His apparently insurmountable lead makes him paradoxically vulnerable: a less than spectacular result in Iowa would prompt a flood of stories headlined 'Has the George W. bubble burst?'. So the Governor is countering any disproportionate Donny- and-Marie Mormon turnout by flying in Norman Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

A couple of candidates didn't even make it as far as Ames. The first Republican for- mally to declare for the presidency was my own Senator, Bob Smith. But he got stalled in the second tier of GOP candi- dates and started to brood on it. I don't know why. Aside from Dubya, everyone's in the second tier: Bush has 98 per cent in the polls, and the pygmies divvy up what's left. But it pushed poor old Bob over the edge: a week or two back, he became the highest-ranking Republican defector in half a century when he announced he was quitting the party to continue his presiden- tial campaign as an independent. Finding herself sitting next to him at a Fourth of July picnic, my assistant Melissa, having tearfully removed the 'Bob Smith For President' bumper sticker from her truck, demanded to know why he was abandon- ing his party. 'George Washington didn't need a party,' he said huffily. This is the way these fellows think of themselves.

A more strategic withdrawal from the field was that of boyish Ohio Congressman John Kasich. He'll go down in New Hamp- shire primary history as the only candidate ever to bury a supporter's dog. Linda Kaiser was preparing to host a small gath- ering for the Congressman at her home in Amherst, NH, when she suddenly realised she was short of ice. She jumped into her car, hit the gas and reversed over her beloved 13-year-old sheepdog Magic. 'He looked up at me,' she said, 'and then he died.' She carried Magic's body to the barn, covered him with a blanket and went back to getting ready for Kasich. The Con- gressman delivered his usual stump speech on the Federal budget and tax reform and then offered to bury the pooch. 'If I ever told my wife I left without burying this dog, we'd be divorced,' he told her. 'Get a shovel.'

'He revealed himself as a real person,' said Linda afterwards. 'I can't imagine Elizabeth Dole or George W. Bush bury- ing my dog.' But, as Congressman Kasich was in her backyard burying Magic, politi- cal observers across the state were burying him. He came to my local inn for breakfast and managed to irritate all of us. He's written a book called Profiles in Courage about 'ordinary people' who lead 'inspira- tional lives', not exactly the sort of thing you want to wash down the eggs and pan- cakes with. Mr Kasich told us about a shoeshine boy in Philadelphia or Balti- more who gave his tips to put kids through college. 'Not all of us have it in ourselves to be a shoeshine boy,' he said. 'That's why I'm running for president.' I like a lot of syrup on my waffle, but that's too much even for me. The Congressman has now withdrawn and endorsed Bush in the hope of landing the number two spot on the ticket. Don't be so hard on yourself, John: maybe you do have it in you to be a shoeshine boy.

Lamar Alexander is running anti-Bush attack ads in Iowa, but he's broke and he'll be gone by mid-August. Likewise, Quayle. Elizabeth Dole will fade away. Gary Bauer will hang in as the principal social conser- vative opposition to Bush. But, essentially, as at Dan Quayle's spelling bee, the small potatoes are about to be given the big E. The nomination is Dubya's and, instead of a bruising primary season in which the party tears itself apart, he can spend the next six months quietly figuring out his strategy for taking on the Democratic nominee.

Who, by the way, will not be Al Gore.