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Immediately after Sarah Palin's surprise emergence as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, comparisons to Dan Quayle began. What interests me as a memory researcher is how soon people began to recall the famous exchange during the 1988 vice-presidential debate between Senator Quayle and Senator Bentsen, the Democratic candidate. Bentsen's rebuke of Quayle has become more than a memorable moment; it is an emblematic image of the contrast of experience with naïveté. When do political moments become political memories?
When Quayle attempted to quiet doubts about his relative inexperience (a bit more than one term in the Senate and two terms in the House), he pointed out that he had a similar level of elected service as J.F.K. when he was elected president. Bentsen shot back, "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." The audience let out a collective gasp and Quayle was visibly shaken. The media seized on this moment and replayed it endlessly in the hours after the debate right up to election day. It is still available on YouTube where various versions have received over a quarter million hits, a figure that will surely soar into the million hit range after the Palin announcement.
How does such a powerful political moment turn into an iconic political memory? It can't be the media repetition alone since many other similar moments in Quayle's checkered career were derisively replayed or endlessly discussed (his "potatoe" mis-spelling or his "Murphy Brown" speech about single motherhood), but have not had similar traction in the collective memory. I would suggest there are a few key factors that keep a moment like that debate exchange alive and still relevant in our political culture. First, there was the shock and vividness of the moment. How often do we see a political figure of the stature of a vice-presidential candidate caught so completely off-guard and embarrassed on a national stage? Second, and I think this is even more important, Quayle and Bentsen each stood for something more than themselves; they were archetypes respectively for youth and experience. In this sense, this moment had a mythic quality to it. Quayle's imprudent effort to compare himself to a beloved and fallen president (from a different party and different political orientation) was symbolic of a certain callowness and arrogance of youth. Bentsen's reply reflected the blunt truth-telling of an older man - the crusty veteran lawyer-doctor-coach who has too few years left to sugarcoat the hard truths of the world. Hollywood could not have written a better scene in capturing the contrast between two characters that stood for something more than themselves.
In my work on self-defining memories (http://www.jeffersonsinger.com/) or in Dan McAdams's studies of the life story theory of personality, we have found that memories that persist in an individual's life and become thematic of their most important personal concerns contain both strong sequences of emotion reactions and characters or episodes that link to other similar memories. For example, if an individual often returns to a memory of a particular painful argument with a parent, it is likely that this memory connects to a number of similar memories that capture the essence of an ongoing conflict with that parent. The one memory that seems to remain the strongest and most persistent is likely to contain within it the most powerful distillation of the characteristics of that parent, the frustration that he or she would provoke, and the painful ending that would be the inevitable result. In its ability to capture the essence of the struggle between parent and child, this one memory becomes a touchstone or emblem for so many others.
The same is true, I believe, for our political memory. In a political culture, we have certain recurrent themes that define our national discourse about leadership. We look for signs and symbols of decisiveness, integrity, vision, and in the case of Quayle and Bentsen, experience. When a particular political moment can throw a powerful spotlight on this archetypal theme of youth vs. maturity, the moment becomes more than a "spin" item, it enters into our shared psyche and reverberates beyond itself.
So now with the fresh news of a V-P candidate who is 44 years old and who has been governor for only two years and previous to that a mayor and city councilwoman of a small Alaskan city, our memories are stirred to find echoes of similar circumstances in the past. Dan Quayle comes quickly to mind and then with the power of the mythic stories that our narrative memories create, the archetypal exchange between Bentsen and Quayle springs forward. From an abstract consideration of the challenges presented by inexperience, we are thrust into a vivid image of a young man brought up short by a dignified elder statesman. Time will tell how Sarah Palin will fare, and whether similar or very different memories of her debate with Joseph Biden will emerge.
