Entertains Reporters, Plays Football With Family : For Quayle, the End Was a Time for Fun

Finishing his race for the vice presidency at a walking pace, Dan Quayle returned to Indiana Monday for a final reminiscence with the home-state faithful. His favorite campaign sign, he told them, was: “Our Quayle beats their turkey.”

Clearly relieved that his long ordeal was finally over, Quayle paid little attention Monday to the frenetic activity that dominated the campaign’s final hours elsewhere. For Quayle, the end was a time for fun and games.

Besieged by cameras and microphones at the start of the day, Quayle insisted that he ask the questions. At an airport in Virginia, he rallied his family for a football game. Later, he told off-the-record stories to reporters on the back of his campaign plane. It took tugs on the sleeve from each of his three children to bring him back up front to eat cake with his family.

Harsh Parting Shot

To be sure, there was the usual taunting of the opposition, even a harsh parting shot that ridiculed the “frantic desperation” and populist pretensions of Democrat Michael S. Dukakis.

“Do you think that someone who opposes the death penalty for cop killers is ‘on your side’?” Quayle asked his supporters in Roanoke, Va., and here. “Do you think that someone who has raised taxes five times is ‘on your side’?” A chorus of “no’s” grew louder with every Quayle claim, punctuated at the climax in Roanoke by a shout from the crowd.

“Hell, no!” a man yelled. “Hell, no!” Quayle agreed.

“Michael Dukakis is not on your side,” he continued. “He’s on your back. He’s in your pocket. And on Tuesday night, he’s out of luck.”

And there was a note--albeit scripted--of sentimentality. The band here played “Back Home Again in Indiana,” and Quayle told his fellow Hoosiers that his family would “remember that you never wavered when we needed you, and that is our strength for what is yet to come.”

‘Wild Exhilaration’

But Quayle seemed anxious for an end to what he called “weeks of wild exhilaration along with personal testing.” He strode straight to the podium after being introduced to a raucous crowd, and had to be urged by his wife Marilyn to “wave!” to the 2,000 Indiana supporters. All was over by 6 p.m., leaving the Quayles time to drive to nearby Huntington for dinner with his parents.

Early in the day, Quayle was still sensitive about news reports that made much of how the Bush campaign deliberately kept Quayle out of the spotlight in the final week of the campaign.

He took pains in his speeches to report that he had made 235 campaign stops in 39 states during his 11 weeks on the ticket, and announced to reporters that he had been in two-thirds of the nation’s 80 major media markets. He acknowledged that his home-stretch role had been marginal, but insisted that he had simply been used in “the traditional way.”

Referring to the prominent role afforded Democrat Lloyd Bentsen, he said: “My hunch is that any time that a presidential candidate has to hang on the coattails of a vice presidential candidate, you’ve got trouble in the ticket.”

Besides, he added: “You don’t win elections in the last two or three days. You do not win elections in the closing hours of the campaign.”

Football Game With Family

Heeding that axiom even as the rest of the political world ignored it, Quayle’s sensitivity soon dissolved to an irrepressible grin, and he showed no sense of urgency as the campaign drew to a close. His favorite moment came far from the podium, when he spent some 20 minutes playing touch football with his children and aides.

His son, Benjamin, scored a disputed winning touchdown when he used a protective screen of reporters to evade his pursuers, and a beaming Quayle savored the irony.

“We used the media to win,” he said, shirttails still flapping. “Figure it out.”