Video: 'Gore, Quayle, Stockdale: The 1992 vice presidential debate'

(Tuesday, October 13, 1992, 7:00-8:30 p.m. EDT; during the 1992 United States presidential election campaign) — In a debate marked by intensely personal exchanges, Senator Al Gore and Vice President Dan Quayle delivered some of the campaign’s strongest blasts tonight at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, each asserting that the opposing presidential candidate did not deserve to lead the nation for the next four years.

Quayle assailed Gov. Bill Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, as a man who “has trouble telling the truth” and who had habitually waffled on the issues of the day.

Gore accused the Bush administration of presiding over a brutal recession, blind to the suffering that it caused and unwilling to abandon the “trickle down” economic policies of the past 12 years.

James B. Stockdale, the retired vice admiral and political novice who is running with the independent candidate Ross Perot, at times seemed stunned by the sharpness of the exchange and struggled to keep pace. But he tried to reach for Perot’s apolitical appeal, describing the debate as emblematic of the “gridlock” in Washington.