Time & Perspective Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich

The line lands like a compliment that curdles mid-sentence, and that’s the point. Ehrenreich opens with the soft-focus language of political crushes - "lovely blue eyes" - then snaps it into a brutal piece of institutional arithmetic: Dan Quayle as "impeachment insurance". It’s a joke with a policy memo hiding inside it. Desire is the bait; dread is the punchline.

The specific intent is to puncture the pageantry around vice presidents and expose their strategic utility. Quayle isn’t being appraised for leadership, intellect, or vision. He’s being valued as a deterrent: keep the president in office because the alternative is worse. The phrase reframes the VP slot from understudy to booby trap, a role designed to make accountability politically expensive. If the cost of removing a president is elevating someone widely perceived as unready, then impeachment becomes less a constitutional remedy than a high-stakes gamble.

Subtextually, Ehrenreich is indicting a media culture that treats surface charisma as substance while quietly accepting cynical governance. The coy invitation to "look into those... eyes" mimics the way politics is sold - as personality, as photogenic reassurance - and then reveals what’s actually being sold: a safeguard for power.

The context is late-20th-century American politics, when Quayle’s public image (gaffe-prone, lightweight, inherited privilege) made him an easy symbol. Ehrenreich weaponizes that perception to argue something darker: sometimes the system protects leaders not by elevating excellence, but by arranging the fallback option to be unthinkable.