He’s Winning Over Skeptics, Quayle Says at L.A. Meeting

Vice President Dan Quayle said Monday that he is winning over those who had doubts about his ability to handle the job but acknowledged that he still has a tendency toward the occasional gaffe.

“There were a lot of skeptics during the campaign about how I would work out, but now they’re seeing it work out in a very normal, comfortable way,” Quayle said at a breakfast meeting with reporters in Los Angeles.

In a four-day visit to California, Quayle is touring aerospace facilities, hosting fund-raisers for U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson’s 1990 gubernatorial campaign and speaking to the Western Governors’ Conference in Long Beach and the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

At the meeting with reporters Monday, the affable Quayle tensed up only once, and that was when he was asked about his slip-up two days ago in Tennessee.

There, Quayle, speaking of the 20th anniversary of America’s moon walk, got mixed up and referred to astronaut Buzz Aldrin as “Buz Lukens.”

Republican Rep. Donald E. (Buz) Lukens of Ohio was recently convicted of having sex with a minor.

“Well, everybody can make a mistake,” Quayle said Monday, blushing deeply and fiddling with his coffee cup. “If that’s the worst thing I do in the next six months, then the first six months will be in pretty good shape.”

Such slips are not even news for most politicians, but for the 42-year-old vice president they raise old, and some say unfair, questions about his maturity and competence.

So real is the “gaffe watch” with Quayle that reporters who trail him switch on their tape recorders for even the most mundane and predictable events.

And he is very attuned to it. Coming into the breakfast with reporters after a break, he said, “You guys talking behind my back?”

Yes, Quayle said, he knows he has a tendency to mispeak, as when he told the United Negro College Fund recently, “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind” a confusion of the group’s slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

But, he countered, “I think I’m being reviewed well as vice president because people see how I am performing--the responsibility I have, the working relationship I have with the President. “

Quayle Press Secretary David Beckwith said the vice president has so much access to President Bush that the President’s current European trip has given Quayle and his staff their first break in some time.

During the breakfast interview, Quayle left to take a call from Bush, who was in the Netherlands. Quayle refused to say what they discussed, in keeping with his desire to model himself after Bush, who rarely revealed his conversations with former President Ronald Reagan.

Quayle is clearly starting to relax, but the memories of the rough 1988 campaign continue to sting.

“I don’t think I’d wish that experience on anybody else,” he said.

“When you go through that kind of day-in-and-day-out barrage, you really have to dig down deep inside and ask yourself what you’re made of,” he added. “Do you have it? You had to set it aside and look at the goal. . . . When you looked at yourself in the mirror in the morning you had to realize that what had gotten you to the place you are is yourself.

“And the one critical mistake that I made was to rely on the advice of others. If I had it to do over again, I’d do it differently. . . . I would have been a lot more accessible to the press from the outset. I wouldn’t have allowed myself to be in that controlled situation. I share the blame. I could have told them to go to hell but I didn’t.”

A new book about the campaign quotes some of Quayle’s former advisers as making fun of him. But he refused Monday to discuss them or their charges and seemed eager to forgive and forget.

He said he was back to trusting his own political instincts, which got him elected to the Senate in 1980 at the age of 33.

Those instincts have led him, he said, to conclude that on an issue such as abortion, the anti-abortion side--of which he is a strong partisan--will do well to take some limited victories in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision giving states more power to regulate abortion.

The anti-abortion side, he said, “will want to set certain pro-life standards” that include requiring a minor to have parental consent for an abortion and the banning of abortions in public hospitals.

“Most Americans would support that,” Quayle said. “Most people in America support the right of women to have an abortion . . . but most Americans still would rather give preference to the unborn than to abortion on demand.”

In a meeting with Times editors and reporters, Quayle said he thought the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling will help the Republican Party, rather than push it out of the mainstream, as some pundits have suggested.

The GOP’s willingness to compromise and regulate abortions rather than ban them, Quayle contended, will contrast with “the pro-choice forces who will dominate the debate and say there should be no restrictions at all. I don’t think that will play well in the public domain.”

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