Ms. Brown, Meet the Ozzie & Harriet Veep : Quayle knocks TV sitcom to rail about family values

Vice President Dan Quayle, in the throes of election-year politics, was on traditionally safe rhetorical ground in a San Francisco speech Tuesday as he sounded a call for a return to “moral values.” Who would call for immoral values? Problem is, he then got specific--and a standard “family values” stump speech that could have been delivered by vice presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon in 1952 crashed headfirst into the uncomfortable realities of 1992.

Said Quayle: “It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown--a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman--mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘life-style choice.’ ”

“Oh dear,” said one senior Bush campaign official when told of Quayle’s attack on a popular television character who had just given birth in front of 38 million fans, a lot of them women, a lot of whom vote.

Oh dear indeed. “Murphy Brown” creator Diane English astutely shot back: “If the vice president thinks it’s disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he’d better make sure abortion remains safe and legal.”

That was right on target, and soon President Bush’s press spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, was put in the awkward position of praising the fictional television reporter for at least not choosing to have an abortion. The politically seasoned Bush merely decried the increase in “broken homes” and shied away from attacks on Murphy Brown and real-life single mothers.

Quayle, visiting a Los Angeles school Wednesday, dug himself in deeper with simplistic put-downs of the evils of single motherhood. Countered a 14-year-old who seems more in tune with the harder choices often faced in life: “What would you prefer? A single mom, or a dad who gets drunk and beats your mom?” A telling retort.

But there are no shades of gray allowed in Quayle’s vision of a world that itself seems based on television sitcoms--of the 1950s. It was essentially a “poverty of values” that was directly related to the rioting in Los Angeles, Quayle said.

Actually, Quayle is right in attacking a poverty of values in the nation. His key error is in fixating on the erosion of moral values in the inner city, as if morality has remained constant elsewhere.

There is a poverty of values in the nation. Children everywhere do need loving parents. But divorce happens in half of U.S. marriages. Today nearly 60% of married women with children under age 6 work, and most do so out of economic necessity--their husbands don’t earn enough money to support a family.

And where is the moral compass in Washington? Working parents need affordable child care. Children need health care--but more and more are not covered by health insurance.

A job, child care and health insurance won’t be a problem for Murphy Brown and her son, of course. The character makes a good salary--and no doubt has a good company health policy. But what about the other America? Perhaps the vice president now could focus his speeches and his efforts on attacking the poverty of values in Washington that hurts real-life working families.