Wilson Believes His Senate Campaign Will Be Helped by Quayle

All day Wednesday, Republican Sen. Pete Wilson sang the praises of his close friend Dan Quayle. He said it best with a bear hug after the two senators appeared with Vice President George Bush before members of the California delegation here.

“Because we are close personal friends, I have a hard time containing myself,” Wilson said. “Dan Quayle will be a tremendous asset to George Bush. He will help win in California, not just for George Bush and himself, but for the rest of the ticket,” said Wilson, who is in the midst of a reelection campaign.

He made those remarks about Quayle before reports that the hawkish senator from Indiana used family influence to join the Indiana National Guard and, by doing so, avoid military duty in Vietnam.

On Thursday, Wilson said he thought “the burden is on Dan Quayle” to clear up any doubts about his service record and answer any other “legitimate” questions about his background. But Wilson, who is running against Democratic Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, said he did not think he would pay a price for his loyalty to Quayle.

Lot of Emotions

“I think the things that motivated me to give him such a warm endorsement continue to be true,” Wilson said.

There were a lot of emotions wrapped up in Wilson’s embrace of Quayle on Wednesday. Friendship, congratulations and new excitement about a presidential campaign that has been giving Wilson, as well as a lot of other California Republicans, a case of the jitters.

Before the convention, statewide polls showed Bush trailing his Democratic opponent, Michael S. Dukakis, by 16 points. Wilson’s concern was that weakness at the top of the ticket could sap Republican strength and that his lead over McCarthy could vanish in a Democratic landslide.

Bush’s choice of Quayle, who sits on the Senate Armed Service Committee with Wilson and shares his bullish conservatism on defense issues, clearly renewed Wilson’s faith in the Republican presidential race.

“He (Quayle) knows more about defense and foreign policy than the Democratic nominee for President can ever expect to learn,” Wilson said.

Conservative Democrats

Before the flap over Quayle’s National Guard record, Wilson said Quayle would shore up the presidential campaign in a vulnerable area in California, the large bloc of conservative Democrats who voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Before the convention, Wilson’s own polls gave him an 86% favorable rating with Reagan Democrats, compared to 59% for Bush.

“He is a proven vote-getter,” Wilson said, referring to Quayle’s upset victory over Democratic Sen. Birch Bayh in 1980. “He won blue-collar voters, minorities and women. He will help win the same way in California. . . .”

Quayle has also given Wilson a personal connection to the top of the ticket. Their friendship has drawn him into the penumbra of presidential politics--a nice place to be, providing the new vice presidential candidate does not turn out to be a liability.

At the convention, the unflamboyant junior senator from California was suddenly in demand as people sought his opinion of Quayle.

“The relationship is just a tremendous plus for us,” Otto Bos, Wilson’s campaign manager, said Wednesday. “There was almost a sigh of relief when Quayle was announced. There had been so few linkages with the (presidential) campaign. Now, there is a connection.”

If the Quayle candidacy were to self-destruct, political observers tend to share Wilson’s view that he would not be seriously damaged.

“If this guy is going . . . down and Pete Wilson becomes his last-ditch defender, he’s in trouble. But if he just says ‘we’re friends’ and ‘I like him,’ I don’t see much trouble,” said Times political analyst William Schneider.

Still, the Quayle candidacy offers ammunition to Wilson’s opponent.

Like Bush, Quayle is a man of substantial means. Quayle is a member of a prominent publishing family that owns the Indianapolis Star and the Arizona Republic. Even before Quayle entered the picture, McCarthy was doing his best to portray Wilson and Bush as two peas in the same privileged pod. “Pete Bush” and “country club Republicans” were McCarthy’s ways of trying to suggest that the two well-heeled Yale graduates were out of touch with the average voter.

Wilson arrived in Washington two years after Quayle, but the two men became friends on the Senate Armed Services Committee, fighting the Democratic leadership over a variety of defense issues, including funding for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the space-based missile defense system often referred to as Star Wars.

For the last two years, Quayle and Wilson have urged Reagan to veto defense-spending bills passed by Congress because the measures contained restrictions on SDI development.

Wilson’s opponent argues that Senate voting records show that Wilson is even further to the right on a number of issues than the conservative Quayle.

The McCarthy campaign contends that Wilson failed to support Quayle’s efforts to restore $450 million to job-training programs established under the Jobs Partnership and Training Act, which Quayle helped pass in 1982.

The McCarthy campaign also contends that Wilson broke with Quayle when the California senator voted “to cut $1 billion from the federal anti-drug effort and opposed another $4 billion in funding for anti-drug programs.”