Leadership Quote by Dan Quayle

Quayle is trying to turn biography into policy, and you can hear the gears grinding. The line is built like a testimonial: "very good" repeats as if repetition can stand in for evidence. He starts with the safe, unassailable premise (I love my family) and then slides toward a political claim (therefore, my party can govern "the family"). That pivot is the real intent: to present "family values" not as an argument but as an identity badge, something you possess rather than something you debate.

The subtext is defensive. In late-20th-century Republican politics, "the family" often functioned as a euphemism for a bundle of cultural anxieties: divorce, teen pregnancy, feminism, queer visibility, and the sense that social change was accelerating faster than people’s comfort with it. By foregrounding his own "good family", Quayle positions himself as a trustworthy steward of moral order, implicitly contrasting himself with a vague, disorderly "other" without naming any group directly. It's an inclusionary phrase that still draws a boundary.

Context matters because Quayle was frequently framed as lightweight and gaffe-prone; this kind of earnest, clunky affirmation reads like message discipline under stress. "It's one of the things we have in our platform, is to talk about it" accidentally gives away the game: the platform item is not necessarily to enact specific supports for families (wages, childcare, healthcare) but to talk about them. The rhetoric is less a plan than a signal flare to voters who want reassurance that someone is on their side of the culture war.