Ben Quayle's 'Worst President Ever' Ad Draws Sharp Reactions

(Aug. 12) -- Ben Quayle, son of former Vice President Dan Quayle and congressional candidate in Arizona, has released an intentionally controversial ad in which he claims Barack Obama is the "worst president in history."

What does the internet think of this?

Not much.

Quayle owes William Henry Harrison and some other awful presidents an apology.

On the Washington Post's "Post Partisan" blog, opinion writer Alexandra Petri opines:

But even if you aren't willing to recognize William Henry Harrison's commitment to being the worst president in history, there are others to choose from! Look at Benjamin Harrison! He didn't accomplish much, and people said shaking his hand was like manhandling a wilted petunia. If you're just going by handshakes, Calvin Coolidge was said to have a handshake like a dead fish wrapped in newspaper. And he doesn't seem to have done much for the economy. And what about Warren G. Harding? Former Treasury Secretary William McAdoo said that "His speeches left the impression of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork." That sounds awful!

"Ben Are You Feeling Okay?"

Under a post carrying that headline, National Review's Jim Geraghty goes on to observe, "This is the slowest delivery I've seen since I spent a few hours waiting for my bags at the Denver airport luggage carousel."

Quayle deserved to be applauded for his restraint (though not sincerely).

"It's nice to see that the guy is really trying to keep his conservative rhetoric at a reasonable level, so as to be appropriately serious about the job he's applying for and not like a ridiculous caricature of a Tea Party candidate," writes Dennis DiClaudio at Comedy Central. "I mean, he could have said something ridiculously hyperbolic, like 'Barack Obama is a half-arachnid super-villain,' or 'Barack Obama is not made of normal matter like you and I, but pure solid-state Socialism.' But he didn't. He kept it clean. And I respect that."

Quayle was trying to change the subject.

CQ Politics' Katherine Rizzo notes that this ad came out right after it was revealed that Quayle was involved, perhaps very involved, with a gutter-minded gossip and looks-rating site called the DirtyScottsdale.com (now Thedirty.com, and not entirely safe for work), whose proprietor says Quayle chronicled his search for the 'hottest chick' in Scottsdale under the pseudonym "Brock Landers."

Rizzo asks:

If you're a Republican in Arizona, which candidate are you more likely to talk about -- the one who runs an ad declaring, 'Barack Obama is the worst president in history' and offers to go to Washington and 'knock the hell out of the place,' or the one who admits posting to DirtyScottsdale.com, but says it happened four years ago and didn't involve much anyway?

The changing-the-subject theory is supported by the fact that there's another subject Quayle would seem to want to change.
Last week, he drew fire for a pro-life, anti-gay marriage campaign mailer that showed him with two young girls, who turned out (though the mailer did not disclose this) not to be his own -- the 33-year-old Quayle and his wife do not have children.