It wasn't just politics; it spread like wildfire.

It's a tad bit unfair, too, because Quayle was reading from cue cards, and possibly from cue cards from the spelling competition, whose winner he was congratulating. If the official competition spelling was "potatoe", who was he to argue? And I could easily get caught by "Oh... I guess without-the-e is a super-common regionalism."

But, something about Dan Quayle just stirred up the media like nobody's business. Any slip he made would be trumpetted for all the world to hear.