Stop Me If You've Heard This One

By John Greenwald

FLEXING HIS RHETORICAL MUSCLES BEFORE THE VICE-PRESIdential debate, DAN QUAYLE explained what he called the essence of the Republican campaign. "If you give a person a fish," he said, "they'll fish for a day. But if you train a person to fish, they'll fish for a lifetime." Besides misquoting the proverb (it's ". . . feed him for a day" and ". . . feed him for a lifetime"), Quayle was stealing a page from an unlikely book: Democrat Michael Dukakis recited the lines often during his 1988 campaign. Not to worry. The saying has been a favorite with orators since the ancient Chinese.