Quayle Sees New York as Flawed Reflection of Democratic Ills

Vice President Dan Quayle charged Monday that by picking New York as the site for next month’s Democratic National Convention, Democrats have shown a “strange compulsion to return to the scene of the crime.”

In a speech to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative study group, Quayle sharply criticized New York’s labor unions, school system, tax structure, the size of its municipal work force and the safety of its streets.

“Here is what’s right about New York: the decent, hard-working people who live here,” the vice president told an enthusiastic luncheon audience. “Here’s what’s wrong with New York: the entrenched government Establishment and its liberal ideology that have failed them.”

Quayle labeled New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo as “liberalism’s sensitive philosopher king” and sarcastically predicted that Cuomo would deliver “a touching oration on compassion” at the Democratic convention.

“But I want to leave a message for the Democrats: Take a good look around you,” Quayle said. “Look at what your tired old ideas have done to this city.”

New York Lt. Gov. Stan Lundine charged that Quayle had become “the attack dog of the Bush reelection campaign, a modern version of Spiro Agnew.”

“They both attacked people described as part of the cultural elite. I predict that Quayle’s views will be just as discredited in the ‘90s as Agnew’s were in the ‘70s,” Lundine said. “Once again, the victimizer is coming to New York to blame the victim. . . . The vice president’s strategy is obvious and cynical. He’s trying to deflect attention from glaring Republican failures.”

Quayle charged that New York’s school system has more bureaucrats than the entire educational system of France and criticized programs that provide condoms to high school students as protection against AIDS.

“One reason our schools are in crisis is because they have, in many ways, lost their moral bearings,” Quayle said. “When eighth-graders are squandering the gift of youthful innocence in premarital sex, the solution is not to give them a condom. The solution is to give them a value-based education, to teach them what is right and wrong, to teach them that they alone are responsible for their actions.

“Public school educators should be less concerned with promoting lifestyles curricula and more concerned with teaching basic values: personal integrity, responsibility, hard work and morality.”

The vice president charged that ordinary taxpayers were being harmed by special interest groups: “the teachers unions, the cultural elite, the bureaucrats, the liberal lobbies jostling for more space at the public trough.”

He called for a freeze on government hiring in New York City, a permanent tax break for businesses, the sale of infrastructure assets to the private sector and an end to “that enduring monument to economic illiteracy: rent control.”

Quayle repeated his call for a resurgence of traditional family values, criticizing “shallow sophisticates” who laugh at those values “in the newsrooms, sitcom studios and faculty lounges of America.”

“They are laughing at America itself, at the families that have always done the real work of building our great nation,” the vice president continued. “They are mocking the source of our nation’s greatness, the source of our goodness and our hope for the future.”

Cuomo charged that Quayle was playing games by attacking New York City because the GOP was in trouble. New York’s governor, who enjoys playing basketball, challenged the vice president to meet him man-to-man on the basketball court.

“Tell Mario I’m from Indiana and I’m a fairly good basketball player,” Quayle replied. “. . . If he saw a little bit of the way Michael Jordan and the Bulls played last night, that’s the way Dan Quayle would play against Mario Cuomo.”