To while away the days until the publication of Sarah Palin's memoirs on November 17th, Rudolph Delson is reviewing the American vice presidential literary canon.

The paramount question of Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir is whether or not Dan Quayle has a sense of humor. On the one hand, Quayle says this: "I've got a pretty good sense of humor."

On the other hand, it is obvious that he does not.

At one point in the book, Quayle describes how he would prepare jokes ahead of time for his weekly lunches with the President. George H. W. Bush "liked good jokes," Quayle reports, but:

I'm one of those people who tend to forget jokes as soon as they hear them ... so rounding up jokes for the President became a line-item responsibility of my press-secretary, Dave Beckwith. He'd call up some of his old buddies in the press and get me one or two that I could tell Bush.

And so Dan Quayle emerges as a type: the determined mid-level manager.

He is competent enough never to be fired, but his earnestness and his eagerness-to-please are precisely what prevent him from ever getting ahead. Like any mid-level manager, Quayle fixates on criticism and schemes for vindication. Long passages of Standing Firm are dry accounts of how Quayle was mistreated by the national press and by the late-night comedians-with Quayle providing by point-by-point rebuttals. Turns out Quayle never said that Latin Americans speak Latin; turns out he was suffering from jetlag when he called those Samoan school children "happy campers"; turns out he was given a cue card that had been typed to read "P O T A T O E." Who knew?

This might be effective if Quayle came across as a big-hearted public servant who was just asking for a fair chance to tell his side. After all, Quayle argues that the press was bigoted against him in 1988 because of his age (Baby Boomer) and because his religion (Born Again); if he is right, he deserves a sympathetic hearing. But Quayle is seldom big-hearted, seldom sympathetic. A flavor of smug dishonesty permeates this memoir. Many chapters in this book left me with the aftertaste of arrogance or manipulation.

So:

* Quayle presents excerpts from what he claims was his private diary, but it is obvious that the private excerpts were always meant to be published. (From Friday, March 1, 1991: "Bush no longer viewed as phlegmatic.")

* Quayle boasts about how it was his idea for Bush to replace White House Chief of Staff John Sununu with Secretary of Transportation Sam Skinner; one paragraph later Quayle contradicts himself, boasts about how he knew Sam Skinner would never work out.

* Quayle chastises Jimmy Carter for giving the 1979 malaise speech that "blamed the American people for the country's ills"; fifty pages later Quayle writes, apropos how "family values" can solve America's problems, that "The enemy was ourselves: the spiritual decay we'd allowed to rot us, the poverty of values we were too afraid to challenge."

* Quayle is disgusted by the sexist caricatures of his relationship with his wife Marilyn, which "make it seem as if she ran the show and I was just a tool for her agenda;" but he does not shrink from sexist caricature of Hillary Clinton, saying, for example, that Al Gore "had to know, in fact, that he was really running for the number three job in a Clinton administration."

Quayle cannot even settle on a believable story about his own childhood:

Throughout my life I've loved beating the odds. I switched elementary schools five times. Whenever I arrived at a new one, the teacher would put me in the last row, which was reserved for the slow kids. Within a matter of weeks I'd made it to the front of the room.

No child has ever had five elementary school teachers, all with the identical seating arrangements. Quayle has fabricated that memory.

And I believe he has fabricated others as well. And so, doubting the author's good intentions, I found myself reading Standing Firm for the laughs. Just because Quayle may has no sense of humor doesn't mean he isn't funny. Here are the first three sentences from his Acknowledgments, presented in their entirety:

Writing these acknowledgments may be the most difficult part of producing this memoir, since so many people have helped me over the years, not only with this book but in living the events it describes. I know that there will be omissions from the list that follows, and I can only hope that anyone I've forgotten will forgive me.

Richard Nixon was one of the people I spoke with before writing this book.

And here is one of Quayle's assessments of the Gulf War:

It is not an overstatement: in Kuwait, we were getting ready to fight for the future of the whole world.

And here is another:

The coalition victory that was unfolding seemed reminiscent of the battle of Agincourt.

And here is the finest moment in all of Standing Firm: Dan Quayle has just given a speech on family values to the Commonwealth Club of California. In the speech, he has criticized the television show Murphy Brown, saying the main character was "mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another 'lifestyle choice.'" There has ensued a national kerfuffle, and the White House is anxious that the Republican Party not be perceived as having insulted America's single moms. So Quayle calls George H. W. Bush, and the two men have this conversation:

"There are a lot of nervous people over here," the President said. "The problem I have is that I've never seen 'Murphy Brown.'"


"Neither have I."


"You haven't?"


"No, I haven't seen the show. But it doesn't make any difference. Forget about Murphy Brown. The issue is the poverty of values."


"Okay," he said. "I'm glad you checked in."

Dan Quayle is not a stupid man. He certainly is not a lazy man. But in 1993 and 1994, there was one conundrum he could not puzzle through: How to use a memoir to recast himself from national vice presidential laughingstock to nationally viable presidential candidate.

And now here comes Sarah Palin, attempting the same hard trick. Sarah Palin, let it be noted, cannot later claim that she never saw Tina Fey.

Previously:

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no awards and earned no distinctions. His novel "Maynard & Jennica" is now available in paperback.