PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICS : Dump Dan? But He’s the Real GOP : Look at Quayle’s ‘competitiveness council,’ catering to the powerful. What could be more Republican?

Remove Dan Quayle from the ticket? No way--he’s the heart and soul of the Republican Party. He has never known any economic hardship. He has used connections at every turn of his life. He fights for corporate interests and against the interests of American working families. The Grand Old Party should replace its elephant--the Republican Party is a Quayle.

President Bush understands this, and that’s why he’s angry with people who doubt Vice President Quayle’s abilities. The President is delighted with Quayle’s performance. Let’s look past the jokes--let’s look at what Quayle is doing with the $4.4-million budget of his office. He has a clear public philosophy and he is showing how he would govern. It’s consistent and it is quintessentially Republican.

When John Sununu is away on travel, Quayle is the Administration’s primary ambassador to the ultra-right wing. Do you think abortion should be illegal even in the case of rape and incest? The vice president will see you; he agrees. It isn’t just social issues, however.

Dan knows economics.

Vice President Quayle, like Vice President Bush before him, heads our national competitiveness effort. We all know that after a decade of Republican rule, we’re falling behind in international economic competition. The problem is too big to be handled piecemeal. That’s why we have the Quayle Competitiveness Council. Let’s look at what it has done.

The Quayle Council doesn’t worry about helping American workers and companies compete in the global marketplace. Instead, the council has become a secret court of last resort for big-business interests. The Quayle Council serves as a shadow government, overruling federal agency decisions while operating under a Nixonian claim of “vice presidential executive privilege.”

We have seen this all before. Two days after he became vice president in 1981, George Bush assumed the helm of the Regulatory Relief Task Force and wrote to thousands of businesses asking them to tell him their problems. Everyone needs somebody to fight for them in Washington--Bush stood up for big business. The task force moved to suspend or derail hundreds of regulations affecting health, environment, workplace safety and energy conservation.

The task force delayed deployment of auto air bags, postponed limits on lead poisoning and undermined nursing-home regulations--all at the behest of industries that opposed the changes. These evasions increased human suffering in case after case. Bush’s task force was so effective, in fact, that word got around town. Noted one lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry: “The lawyer that does not argue all the way to Vice President Bush may be subjecting himself to a malpractice charge. . . .”

The Quayle Council simply continues this tradition of fighting behind closed doors for the well-connected. Don’t like a new recycling requirement from the Environmental Protection Agency? Just go see Dan. Don’t like that pesky new Clean Air Act? Talk to the council. They’ll propose a new rule (as they did last month) so that companies wanting to exceed current pollution limits can do so simply if a state doesn’t object within seven days.

The shadow efforts of the Bush Task Force and the Quayle Council are startling to most people who hear about them. Yet few do. The council releases only limited information about its monthly private meetings. Even now, the Bush Administration is in court fighting the requests of public-interest groups that are seeking more information on how President Bush actively intervened in the regulatory process throughout the 1980s.

This is all part and parcel of the Republican philosophy of economics and government--bail out the rich and powerful, ignore everyone else.

We all know the problems of red tape and bureaucracy. What few of us know is the power of having the vice president on your side.

This attitude is perhaps best summed up by Bush’s first deregulation czar, C. Boyden Gray. In a 1983 address to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, President Bush’s future ethics adviser said:

“If you go to an agency first, don’t be too pessimistic if they can’t solve the problem there. If they don’t, that’s what the (Bush regulatory relief) task force is for. Two weeks ago, (a group) showed up and I asked if they had a problem. They said they did, and we made a couple of phone calls and straightened it out. . . .”

If only we had an Administration that could be so active in solving the economic hardships of everyday working Americans. That, however, will require replacing more than Dan Quayle.