Quayle Tries to Roll Up Score Against ‘Elite’

After weeks of alternately trying to define and castigate the “cultural elite” that he contends is ruining America, Vice President Dan Quayle set out Monday to be their opposite number.

He dished hot dogs at a San Diego youth center. He ventured into a Mission Valley supermarket to buy chocolate chip cookies.

And he brought his lengthy armor-plated motorcade to a screeching halt in Westchester when he found himself in front of a pillar of anti-elitism: a bowling alley.

The vice president entered the El Dorado Bowl, doffed his blue suit coat--but not his gold vice presidential cuff links--and strapped on waiting blue-and-red bowling shoes, Size 10.

He hefted the ball and knocked down three pins. He rolled it again and hit two more.

A bystander offered a helpful hint. “Just pretend it’s Perot,” he said, referring to the potential independent presidential candidate, billionaire Ross Perot. It worked: Quayle’s next roll claimed eight pins.

To embrace middle America by distancing one’s self from an elite is nothing new in American politics--just ask Spiro T. Agnew, who in 1972 campaigned against the “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Or George Bush, who directed his fire in 1988 at the “blame-America-first crowd.”

Quayle’s proclaimed enemy of late has been the “cultural elite,” which he defined to a reporter Monday as “a crowd that looks down on America, that thinks they’re smarter than anyone else,” later adding that the cultural elite is “condescending.”

If defining a common enemy on which to blame problems is vice presidential work, so too is the decidedly unpresidential business of political dismembering. So at appearances in San Diego and Los Angeles, Quayle slung criticism at both Perot and the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

“Ross Perot apparently has a compulsion to investigate people,” Quayle said in San Diego, referring to a Washington Post article reporting that Perot had launched several investigations of President Bush’s professional and political activities.

“Imagine Ross Perot having the IRS, the FBI and the CIA under his control. Who would be investigated next?” Quayle asked.

He repeated the remarks to reporters in Los Angeles, where he spoke Monday night at a campaign rally for Rob Guzman, the Republican nominee for the 33rd Congressional District.

Quayle also criticized Clinton’s new economic plan, which would raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy and use the income for domestic spending and deficit reduction.

The vice president said the plan called to mind “the traditional Democratic plans” espoused by past Democratic nominees Walter F. Mondale and Michael S. Dukakis.