I am writing this on the morning following an event of great national shock.

I am writing this on the morning following an event of great national
shock. The Republicans have chosen Dan Quayle as the Vice-Presidential
candidate. Quayle is a young man, 41, and part of the interpretation is that
the party wants to appeal to the Baby Boomer generation. This is a colossal
miscalculation in this commentator's opinion. I know. I am from the Baby
Boomer generation myself. (Okay, let's say late in the Baby Boomer generation,
very, very late, okay?) I can tell you most of this generation are people who
are getting along but haven't hit it big. Some of us even ride garbage trucks
or clerk in stores. It's not going to appeal to us to see that had we played
our cards differently we could have been Vice-Presidential candidates by now.
That's more for people maybe twenty years or so older, we tell ourselves. Now
this thing happens and every Baby Boomer has to face the fact that some slob
our age--or in my case somewhat over--is making it big. And there are other
similarities. Quayle's family owned newspapers. My family owned newspapers.
The difference is my family kept ours stacked under the cellar steps; his
family published them, so didn't have to keep them under the steps. In any
case, this is all very sobering news and I hope the Republicans are prepared
for the kind of backlash they will get from us politically-aware Baby Boomers.

Mark R. Leeper

[ What I want to know is, what's Quayle got against Canada?? If he wanted
to dodge the war, we have a perfectly good country up here he could have
visited. Does he have a secret foreign policy agenda we don't know about? ]