Time & Perspective Quote by Dan Quayle

Dan Quayle is trying to sell momentum, not a policy. The line is pitched as a shot of campaign caffeine: "thrilling", "challenge", "going forward to tomorrow". It reaches for the classic American political binary - progress versus regression - and it does so with the breathless urgency of a stump speech meant to land in a gymnasium, not a seminar room.

What makes it memorable is that the rhetoric is fighting itself in real time. The sentence accelerates ("how... and how... what a challenge...") then stumbles into a verbal pothole: "go past to the - to the back!" That self-correction exposes the machinery. You can hear the speaker searching for the clean contrast phrase ("backward", "back to yesterday") and grabbing whatever is closest before the thought escapes. The intent is to frame 1988 as a hinge-point election, but the subtext is about performance pressure: the need to sound decisive, inspirational, and simple enough for a nightly news clip.

Context matters. Quayle, as George H.W. Bush's running mate, was already battling a reputation for inexperience and verbal miscues. So a line meant to project vigor becomes, inadvertently, a case study in how political language can collapse under its own rehearsed optimism. The irony isn't that he's wrong about politics being directional; it's that the sentence can't keep its direction straight. In a campaign built on competence and steadiness after Reagan, the accidental comedy undercuts the brand: "tomorrow" versus "the back" is less a choice offered to voters than a glimpse of the candidate trying to keep up with his own script.