Quayle Outraged by Charges in ‘Doonesbury’ Comic Strip

Vice President Dan Quayle, in Southern California for fund-raising appearances, said Thursday that “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau has a personal vendetta against him and that he is outraged the comic strip is running discredited allegations that the vice president has used cocaine.

“I don’t mind a good political fight,” Quayle said at a morning news conference. “But this is just totally absurd. It’s wrong. It’s false. And I’m not surprised, but I am outraged.”

Quayle stopped short of asking newspapers not to publish the disputed strips, which are scheduled to begin Monday and run for two weeks.

“I don’t want to go that far,” he said. “He’s entitled to his opinion.”

But in an angry tone, he added that “Trudeau knows that these allegations . . . are totally without foundation. He knows that these allegations come from convicted criminals.”

In the strips, a fictional newspaper reporter is told that the White House has covered up a federal probe into cocaine use by Quayle.

The Drug Enforcement Administration said Wednesday that it investigated and proved untrue allegations that Quayle used cocaine while he was a U.S. senator in 1982.

The DEA statement said the allegations--made by two convicted drug dealers shortly before the 1988 election--were “pursued to their source and were determined to be untrue.”

The Los Angeles Times also investigated the allegations twice in the last three years and found no evidence to substantiate the drug charges. Several newspapers, including The Times, are considering whether to not publish the controversial strips.

In what the White House called an “unofficial” fund-raising swing for the 1992 election, the vice president also responded to charges that Tuesday’s elections showed voters to be deeply concerned about the sputtering economy and angry at President Bush.

Quayle said he identified with the voter frustration reflected in Tuesday’s election results, but he laid the blame on Congress and he said the Democrats still do not have a candidate who can compete with Bush.

“Six months ago, there was no Democratic candidate with any standing or quality that could prove a threat to the President,” Quayle said. “Today, nothing’s changed.”

Asked about the possible entry of New York Gov. Mario Cuomo into the Democratic presidential primaries, Quayle said: “He’s not a candidate.”