Two Campaigns Have Same Emphasis and Tone : Quayle Borrows Bush Props, Malaprops

Dan Quayle wanted to get his message out, so he marched across the airport taxiway here the other day, positioned himself before an ancient blue fighter jet with a painted “Blue Angels” insignia and, ignoring the plane’s flat tire, tossed a few barbs at Michael S. Dukakis.

A day earlier, the Republican vice presidential nominee mounted a bright orange forklift in Wisconsin and, with obvious delight, cranked the engine to life and maneuvered the machine’s telescopic lift.

As Vice President George Bush frequently says in a quote attributed to (but disavowed by) his favorite philosopher, Yogi Berra: “It was deja vu all over again.”

Same Bag of Tricks

In style, in backdrops, in emphasis and tone, the Dan Quayle campaign is an eerie shadow of Bush’s. Seeking to become George Bush’s George Bush, Quayle has left no angle untried, no political prop unlifted from the vice president’s bag of tricks. Jet planes and heavy machinery, two of Bush’s staples, are only the start.

Certainly, both campaigns are controlled by the same group of disciplined, experienced advisers who might be expected to chart coincidental courses. Even so, the stump similarities are pronounced for two men of different generations and experience.

Quayle appropriates lines straight from Bush speeches. He travels almost daily to the high-tech, defense-oriented plants that have been such a staple of Bush’s tours this year, looking at minuscule products with the studied interest--and occasional glances of boredom--that the vice president has trademarked.

The Indiana senator has spun off a variation of Bush’s “I’m one of you” primary campaign, hampered only by an unfortunate shortage of home states.

Also Masters Malaprops

He has even adopted, albeit not to his pleasure, Bush’s mastery of malaprops.

Heading into his stump speech recitation on the importance of child care, Quayle exuberantly told a group of Springfield, Ill., supporters the other day:

“We understand the importance of having the bondage between the parent and the child.” He meant, it was explained later, to say “bonding.”

To a cheering throng in Oklahoma City Wednesday night, he announced that “we believe that eight years of strength through peace has worked,” unwittingly putting a new spin on Ronald Reagan’s policy of “peace through strength.”

And on Thursday in Moore, Okla., in a discussion about the Holocaust, Quayle first called the wholesale slaughter “an obscene period in our nation’s history.” Then, attempting to correct his implication that America was to blame, he added: “We all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century, but in this century’s history.”

As a newcomer to the national political stage, Quayle has dived into the campaign with a mixture of devil-may-care forthrightness and occasional tongue-tied caution--precisely the yin and yang of Bush himself.

Visual and Verbal Theater

But it is in the visual and verbal theater that the Quayle campaign most closely mimics Bush’s own.

George Bush, born in Massachusetts, reared in Connecticut, owner of a home in Maine and self-declared adopted son of Texas, has raised to new heights this year the art of claiming kinship with folks across the nation.

By the conclusion of the primaries, Bush had jokingly added to his home-state list the states of New Hampshire, Illinois, Tennessee, California, North Carolina, Georgia and others, all based on either brief sojourn or none at all, as the case required.

Quayle, handicapped by the fact that he was born in Indiana and stayed there for most of his life, has nonetheless adopted the technique.

“I’m from Middle America just like the people in this room,” he assured a Rotary Club in Canton, Ohio, a state where he also pledged kinship with legions of blue-collar steelworkers.

“I feel like I’m right at home,” he told supporters in Port Washington, Wis.

“I spent 7 years in Arizona, and I identify with the Southwest, and I know New Mexico,” he declared in Albuquerque, referring to a childhood move from Indiana to Arizona.

And with jet-airplane and heavy-machinery props, Quayle has acted downright Bush-like.

Passes Up the Wares

Bush has, in his effort to convince voters that he is an adventuresome man of the people, commandeered an 18-wheel truck, a ground compressor and assorted forklifts in a display so predictable that reporters once cried out in surprise when he drove past a Caterpillar Inc. plant in Illinois without sampling the wares.

Quayle, similarly, clambered onto the Wisconsin forklift the other day with the aplomb of a veteran operator.

A look of aw-shucks innocence crossed his face. He pondered for a moment how to drive the forklift.

“Just like a regular car?” he asked his hosts.

Then, successfully maneuvering the forklift arm, he grinned and raised his thumb in triumph: a perfect ride.