Quayle’s Lucky Break: His ‘Cultural Elite’ Message Could Siphon Off Perot’s Base : Politics: By making it ‘Us vs. Them,’ the vice president is setting the agenda for the fall campaign--and the Democrats still haven’t caught on.

In the wake of the Murphy Brown uproar, Vice President Dan Quayle has delivered another double-barreled commotion. First, in the past 10 days, he has made two more fire-breathing speeches on family values, one to a convention of Southern Baptists and the other to a National Right to Life gathering. Second, he has demonstrated he does not know how to spell potato .

My West Coast sources say politically aware people in the entertainment industry have made up their minds about the vice president’s “values” theme: It will not play in Peoria. Quayle’s distasteful traditionalist fervor, in this view, simply does not reflect the ethics or concerns of most Americans. Besides, how can you take a man seriously who doesn’t know the names of his vegetables?

But Quayle’s critics are kidding themselves, trying to suppress the message by deriding the messenger. They may think the vice president’s misspelling marks him as an irredeemable jerk, but many of his fellow citizens are not so sensitive, and some will even sympathize with him. (Pop quiz: Is it potatos or potatoes ?)

The same critics are surely right in seeing considerable daylight between most Americans’ general moral posture and the pungency of some of Quayle’s stronger words. Nonetheless, the “values” card might not only help the Bush-Quayle reelection effort, it may even play a moderating role in the campaign.

In his speeches, Quayle again criticized the “cultural elite” that “flees from the consequences of its self-indulgence.” But he also expanded on the idea of this elite as an alien force in American life. The country is made up, he said, of “the cultural elite, and the rest of us.” The elite “mock us in the newsrooms, sitcom studios and faculty lounges,” but “we Americans” must “stand up for our values, stand up for America.” The American people are “playing David to the Goliath of the dominant cultural elite,” he exhorted, “but remember the final outcome” of that battle: “The Philistines fled.”

This is unattractive stuff. It says only the people on Quayle’s side of the argument can lay legitimate claim to the label “American.” One of our worst national characteristics in politics is the tendency to read our opponents out of the rolls of American citizenship--and parts of the Quayle speeches serve as fair examples of this nasty habit.

But the recent Quayle sorties, despite the rough language, are not the beginning of a crusade--which would fail--to Puritanize American life. Instead, speeches like his accomplish two other things.

First, such talk shores up the Bush Administration’s base among social conservatives. They are not a majority in America, but they constitute a Peoria in which the vice president’s ideas will play to standing-room-only crowds. Solidifying a core constituency is a prudent thing to do for an electorally weak Administration facing a three-way presidential race. In olden times, national politicians could do this type of cheerleading in obscurity, with their most inflammatory words heard only by the special groups they were addressing. But now, because of modern communications, we are constantly eavesdropping on each other’s private political conversations.

Second, Quayle’s theme promises benefits for the Administration’s campaign even among many who do not share his moral fervor but do share a general unease with TV, movies and a popular culture that seems out of control. Often these are the same people now lured, to the Administration’s discomfort, by the siren song of Ross Perot.

Perot, it is becoming clear, is a strange man. He has displayed an authoritarian temperament in his business and public life and in the preemptory ways he proposes to deal with problems ranging from entitlements to the cost of U.S. troops abroad. He is cavalier about constitutionally rooted civil liberties and about institutions with which the Constitution says a President must share power. The different versions he gives of his own life are starting to make Ronald Reagan’s lapses in this area look trivial and benign.

In short, Perot is dangerous. Moreover, his attitudes do not reflect the considered views of the electorate: Americans of all kinds remain massively attached to the basic features of the American system. Yet Perot maintains his political strength because he has succeeded in presenting himself as the ultimate outsider to a citizenry that has been brought to mistrust all insiders.

We know today’s citizens are increasingly alienated from their government and public officials. Many Americans have come to see today’s politics and government as one vast sinkhole of incompetence and corruption. Even with the large problems our nation faces, this despair is out of proportion.

There is more than one reason for this mistrust, which has been building for a quarter-century. But the “cultural elite” cannot deny having had a hand in shaping it. If popular culture has shaken tradition regarding sexual morality, parts of the elite have also mounted a challenge in the arena of conventional politics.

To take the largest example, the national press, since Watergate, has given news consumers an unending stream of political scandal. Yet national politics is, by most measures, far cleaner than it was 25 years ago. But there is no way that newspaper readers and TV viewers absorbing this reportage can escape thinking that today’s politicians are incorrigibly dirty.

The view we get from movies that deal with politics is even darker, ranging from simple corruption to grand conspiracies to steal the presidency from the American people. “The “faculty lounges” that Quayle cited are, like the sitcoms, a mixed bag, but some major university campuses have been seedbeds for critiques of the profound structural racism, sexism and imperialism said to infest our conventional social and political institutions.

Those who have purveyed this radical political disaffection may have hoped it would lead to a more just America. Instead, what they begot was Perot, and they should recognize him as their child.

By pounding away at the theme of the cultural elite vs. America’s traditional values, Quayle is asserting that the Administration should be seen not as a bunch of political insiders but as the champion of all those cultural outsiders who feel denigrated and ignored by the media and popular culture. In other words, he argued that voters should exempt him and President George Bush from the “insider” curse of 1992.

More important, in appealing to traditional values, Quayle took the quickest and most powerful route to generally delegitimizing what have been called the “chattering classes” and casting grave doubt on whatever comes out of their collective mouths. Once people are reminded of how little they trust the “cultural elite,” they can be persuaded to exercise this mistrust in other areas. If members of the elite are insensitive to issues of family values, there is no reason to think them trustworthy on general politics. If they say American politics stinks, they should not be believed any more than they should be trusted on the issue of sex.

But if American politics does not stink in the way Hollywood says it does, then Perot should not get credit for being the outsider who champions the people against the Establishment. To the contrary: Perot can be portrayed as a creature of the cultural elite and its cynical view of American political life. His contempt for other politicians and his insistence on his unique ability to save us are perhaps messages not from the majority of Americans, but from an elitist fringe. Quayle has actually started in on this idea, chiding Perot for not showing sufficient respect for the Constitution.

If this strategy works, the “family values” issue will have tapped into some of the same anti-Establishment voter anger to which Perot appeals and will shake Perot loose from his position as the embodiment of average people’s sentiments. Even for those who do not like some of Quayle’s recent speeches, this is probably a good trade.