Take That!

These deathbed words are attributed to a variety of actors: “Dying is easy. Comedy’s hard.” The presidential campaign offers a quadrennial lesson; for every political zinger that makes it into the history books, there are a hundred that fall flat—or worse.

By Todd S. Purdum | Vanity Fair


There is no more perennial, or potentially perilous, reality of the modern presidential campaign than the planned, canned, not-always-grand one-liner—as this year’s Republican primary has reminded the world.

Herman Cain’s whole campaign, to be honest, was a string of one-liners, until the punchlines ultimately knocked him out. Michele Bachmann has gotten off more than her share, including her description of her interchangeable, ersatz-conservative rivals as “Newt Romney,” and her one-word-association for Romney, when asked: “Hair.”

Gingrich and Romney themselves have been notably less successful in finding the succinct phrase to sum up their cause. And poor Rick Perry, in an attempt to echo one of the more memorable one-liners of recent years—the GOP’s 2004 taunt that John Kerry was for the Iraq war before he was against it—had this to say about Romney’s support for the Massachusetts health-insurance plan:

I think Americans just don’t know sometimes which Mitt Romney they’re dealing with. Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment? Was it was before he was before the social programs from the standpoint of he was for standing up for Roe versus Wade before he was against Roe versus Wade? Ah, he was for Race to the Top. He’s for Obamacare, and now he’s against it. I mean, we’ll wait until tomorrow and see which Mitt Romney we’re really talking to tonight.

Was it was before he was before?

The problem with the planned one-liner is brutally simple, as veteran Democratic presidential and campaign press secretary Mike McCurry explains. “They’re hard to do, because, look: They work because they’re authentic and genuine and they reflect some real emotion or authentic feeling,” McCurry told me the other day. “So the more they’re rehearsed and planned, the more you kind of roll your eyes and say, ‘Well, that was a canned line.’”

“They work because they’re authentic and genuine and they reflect some real emotion or authentic feeling.”

As it happens, McCurry was present at the creation of perhaps the single most devastating one-liner of the modern age: Lloyd Bensten’s withering put-down of Dan Quayle in 1988. The line had its origins in the callow Quayle’s own stump-speech claim that he had more experience in Congress than John F. Kennedy did when he sought the presidency in 1960.

At a debate-prep session in Austin, Dennis Eckart, a young Democratic Congressman from Ohio, played Quayle. He invoked the JFK comparison, and, McCurry recalled, Bentsen replied, “He’s no more Jack Kennedy than the man in the moon!” At that, Michael Sheehan, the Democratic speech-and-debate coach par excellence, said, “That’s a point which you could say.”

For his part, Quayle had been coached by his advisers not to raise the JFK comparison in debate. But he did so anyway, in his single encounter with Bentsen in Omaha. And Bentsen, the courtly, patrician from Texas was poised to strike. “Senator,” he said, “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

“It certainly was not rehearsed in the tri-partite formation,” McCurry recalled. “That was all Bentsen—the delivery, the performance, the nailing of it in the moment.” In the aftermath, Bentsen’s own wife, B.A., and other campaign advisers worried that the line might have come across as too harsh. But the saving grace, McCurry recalled, was that when the line was delivered, the close shot was on Quayle’s terrified face, not Bentsen’s stern visage.

By most measures, Ronald Reagan long ago retired the title of King of the One-Liners. Fritz Mondale’s impatient 1984 demand: “Where’s the beef?” (lifted from a Wendy’s advertisement) was funny enough. But Reagan’s genial put-down after he’d seemed to wander into the byways of old age in his first debate with Mondale—“I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience”—sealed the outcome of their race: it was a Reagan landslide everywhere but Minnesota and the District of Columbia.

“Reagan, uniquely, got away with it, because he was trained to rehearse and rehearse,” McCurry said. “So he knew how to deliver. He’s in a different category.”