Quayle Says He Would Add Baby Boom Outlook to White House

When Dan Quayle was called up from obscurity, Republicans sold it as a “bold leap across generations.” On Tuesday, Quayle made a stab at living up to this billing.

The 41-year-old senator, who has been shadowed for weeks by bad publicity, gloomy polls and the bay of critics, tried a new tack with an unusual speech about youthful perspective. On the campus of a state college here, he declared that, yes, being a baby boomer, a child of the 1960s, will add a unique dimension to the tone and sensitivities of a Bush-Quayle Administration.

His speech inventoried the burdens of the maturing baby boom generation (those born from about 1947 to about 1965):

Couples who must not only rear their children for 18 years but then must care for their parents for another 18, a topsy-turvy job market that means multiple and often painful career changes in a lifetime, the crushing weight of expanding information, the spread of chemicals that threaten health and a pace of living that seems destined to forever accelerate.

‘Generations Are Different’

“As a nation we have had the wisdom to realize that generations are different, that the challenges before generations are different and that the responses by the leadership of America must be different,” Quayle said.

He offered no bold or revolutionary solutions. But by raising problems and challenges as his generation confronts them, Quayle took sight on that moody and powerful voter group--his peers. So far, polls have detected virtually no generational swing in support of the GOP as a result of George Bush’s selection of Quayle as a running mate.

This was Quayle’s first all-out effort to try to change that and excite his fellow baby boomers--capitalizing on what Democrats have tried to exploit as one of his weaknesses, his youth.

“It is a unique responsibility for me, one which I feel more deeply every day, to help George Bush define the needs of a new generation of Americans. . . .,” he said.

“We’re called the baby boomers; we’re identified as the first modern Americans to achieve leadership having not lived through any part of the Great Depression, World War II or the New Deal.”

Enthusiastic Audience

Quayle spoke to an enthusiastic audience at McNeese State University. No more than three protesters could be seen in the indoor auditorium rally of 2,000, an unusually scant showing compared to other appearances. The college newspaper, however, greeted Quayle with a caustic editorial, blaming the Republicans for making Lake Charles a city “in dire economic straits, a true victim of the Reagan years.”

There was no mention by the Indiana senator of one event that molded his generation, the Vietnam War. His decision to stay home and join the National Guard during the height of the Asian combat and domestic protest has been the main source of constant criticism about his leadership and character.

Quayle may have had these critics in mind when he declared: “While they call us the children of the ‘60s, I think our generation is less significant for its past than for its future.”

Of the futuristic themes, one that ran strongest through Quayle’s presentation was his belief that the worker of today and tomorrow must prepare for multiple careers.

‘Two-Career Lives’

“We’ve already gotten used to two-career families; now we need to get ready for two-career lives--two jobs, perhaps in dramatically different fields,” he said. As for those young Americans still in school, “they can expect as many as 4 or 5 or 6 different jobs.”

Without being specific, he said this calls for emphasis on education and retraining in tomorrow’s America.

Moreover, he said, employers must “accommodate” workers who want to rear families while holding down jobs.

In a one-paragraph reference without embellishment in his speech, Quayle, who was born to a newspaper publishing family, declared:

“With minimum regulation we will want to assure America’s history of freedom of the press amid the revolution in communications technology which is happening right now. But we must never and we will never neglect the equally vital right to privacy of every American citizen and every American home.”

Resumes Themes

From Louisiana, Quayle boarded his campaign plane, Hoosier Pride, and flew to Houston, where he resumed his typical themes of attacking Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis, including a call for Dukakis to resign from the American Civil Liberties Union.