Perot Has Begun to ‘Fizzle,’ Quayle Says : Campaign: Texas tycoon still draws big crowds, but vice president, citing polls, says the challenge is weakening.

With a boldness Republicans hope is borne out by new polls, Vice President Dan Quayle declared Friday that the upstart campaign of Ross Perot has already begun to “fizzle.”

The assessment stood in sharp contrast to the crowds drawn by Perot in California on Thursday and in Colorado on Friday. But “you’re beginning to see the campaign unfold as we thought it would,” Quayle told a gathering of radio talk-show hosts. “There are a lot of questions about Ross Perot. There is a big question mark out there on what kind of person he would be.”

At the same forum, Quayle delivered a stern condemnation of rap singer Ice-T’s recording “Cop Killer” and Time Warner’s willingness to sell the “obscene record.” He said the entertainment company had shirked its “corporate responsibility.”

Continuing what has become a running critique of the nation’s moral values, Quayle said Time Warner is “making money off a record that is suggesting it’s OK to kill cops and that is wrong. Where is the corporate responsibility here? I’m not going to tell them what to do but I know that . . . that is wrong.”

The record’s lyrics have prompted calls for a boycott of Time Warner products. At one point, Ice-T says: “I’m ‘bout to dust some cops off . . . Die, pig, die.”

Ice-T has said the song is not a call to violence but is meant as the first-person lament of a character “who is fed up with police brutality.”

But the vice president saved his harshest words for Perot, and seemed to savor his role as the lieutenant assigned to attack political rivals. He said the Texas tycoon had brought his troubles on himself by hiring two “millionaire handlers.” He also called the challenger’s refusal to testify before a Senate committee “a sign of his irrational behavior.”

The references were Perot’s decision to hire as campaign advisers two well-paid political consultants, Edward J. Rollins and Hamilton Jordan, and to his decision to renege on a pledge to appear before a Senate panel looking into POW/MIA issues.

Most polls continue to show Perot running even with or ahead of President Bush. But Bush campaign strategists who have plotted the results of those studies say they show Perot has reached a plateau.

A Gallup poll this week showed Perot’s support falling since early June from 39% to 34%, leaving him in a statistical dead-heat with Bush. The share of voters holding unfavorable opinions of the Texas tycoon increased over the same period from 25% to 30%. Bush advisers say private polls conducted by the campaign and others have turned up similar findings.

“If you look at the last 15 or 20 days of national polls, you’ll see that he’s gone essentially flat,” one Bush campaign aide said of Perot in an interview Friday.

In turning his attention to Perot’s refusal to appear before the Senate Select POW/MIA Committee, Quayle opened a particularly blunt attack. Perot abruptly told the panel this week that the current political climate would transform his testimony into “a media circus.”

But Quayle portrayed the withdrawal as a sign of weakness. “He has said that he had a lot of information about the POW/MIA issue,” Quayle said of Perot. “He said he wanted to testify before the Senate committee, willing to go forward and tell all.

“He owes it to the families to tell that committee what he knows,” Quayle said. “He owes it to the American people to tell that committee what he knows. And that is a sign of irrational behavior to one day say he’s going to testify and the next day to back down.”