Quayle Stands by ‘Murphy Brown’ View : Families: The vice president says ‘American people’ support his opinion even if Hollywood and the media are upset.

Retreating not one inch from the latest controversy in which he has landed, Vice President Dan Quayle said Thursday that “the media elite and Hollywood” may be upset over his criticism of the television show “Murphy Brown,” “but the American people support what I’m talking about.”

Back in Washington after a California tour dominated by his complaint that “Murphy Brown” glamorized a woman giving birth out of wedlock, Quayle said that his focus was on “personal responsibility” and that he delivered “a wake-up call to the men of America.”

“I’ve got a message to deadbeat dads--pay up,” Quayle said in a brief encounter with reporters. “For those that aren’t at home and have divorced their spouse, or their spouse has divorced them, you’d better pay up. There is a responsibility on your part.”

Quayle’s remarks continued to be a lightning rod Thursday. Former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. drew laughs and cheers during a campaign stop at UC Santa Cruz with his mocking references to Quayle. “Personal responsibility,” Brown said huffily. “I wish personal responsibility would start in the White House.”

“What nerve!” exclaimed Chong Kojima of Burbank late Thursday. “Why doesn’t he (Quayle) prove what he is saying by giving Michael Kojima’s money back?”

Entrepreneur Michael Kojima, who gave $500,000 to an April GOP dinner where he met Quayle, has been identified by the Los Angeles district attorney as a “deadbeat dad” who owes Chong Kojima’s two daughters $100,000 in back child-support payments.

Chong Kojima and another ex-wife and sons of Michael Kojima have made separate appeals to party officials for money they say they are owed. The party has refused to give up claim to the hefty donation and asked a federal judge to arbitrate the matter.

But Quayle has not been directly involved in the Kojima flap. On Thursday his staff excitedly buzzed over the tempest, including some notices that compared Quayle’s commentary to the attack-dog tactics employed two decades ago by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew.

“We’re having a lot of fun with this. Every once in a while, something you try goes off beyond your wildest dreams. This is wonderful. It’s a debate that’s good for the country and it’s good for us,” Quayle spokesman David C. Beckwith said.

At the heart of this view is the expectation that, even as Quayle is made the butt of Johnny Carson’s closing run on “The Tonight Show” and of other comedians, the nationwide audience will step back from the brouhaha and agree with the vice president’s core message.

For Quayle, the return to the spotlight follows what has been a slow process of painting a portrait of a conservative politician who first was seen only in caricature.

As the gaffes for which he became known faded from memory, he appeared on front pages from time to time--in Chile, gaining a reassurance from Daniel Ortega, the left-wing Sandinista and former president of Nicaragua, that he would turn over power to a democratically elected government, and in Atlanta, delivering a harsh lecture to the American Bar Assn. on the need to reform the litigious nation’s civil justice system.

The latest foray “is the best thing that’s happened to us since the lawyers’ speech last summer,” Beckwith said.

Insisting that he “wouldn’t change one word in the speech” he delivered to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Tuesday, the vice president told reporters:

“I’m sure that the media elite and Hollywood didn’t like the speech that I gave. But the American people support what I’m talking about, and I’m talking about values. I’m talking about family. I’m talking about integrity. I’m talking about opportunity. I’m talking about personal responsibility, and Hollywood and the media elite may not understand that but America does.”

If the attack on the “media elite and Hollywood” has a familiar ring, it is because Agnew, playing to a conservative constituency in the law-and-order days of the Richard M. Nixon Administration, made just such attacks a central theme of his vice presidency.

Is Quayle turning into Bush’s Agnew?

Quayle himself has joked about that possibility. Playing off a crack by his opponent, Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, in the vice presidential debate four years ago, that Dan Quayle was “no Jack Kennedy,” the vice president said shortly into his term that he asked President Bush that very question.

No, Bush was said by Quayle to have replied, “I knew Spiro Agnew . . . and you’re no Spiro Agnew.”

Agreed, said one longtime Washington Republican whose ties reach back to the Nixon years.

“The difference between Quayle at this stage and Agnew,” he said, “is by the time Agnew was making these speeches, he was no longer regarded as a buffoon. He was regarded as a threat.”

Times staff writers Sam Fulwood III and Laurie Becklund contributed to this story.