Quayle Defends White House, Insists He Will Stay on Ticket : GOP: The vice president says ‘sky is not falling in’ on economy, but group of Chicago home builders complains about lack of consumer confidence.

Vice President Dan Quayle delivered a ringing defense of the Bush Administration on Monday while striving to put to rest speculation that his place on the Republican ticket is in peril.

“This is a closed issue. It’s past tense,” Quayle snapped at one point, clearly irritated by the unrelenting barrage of reporters’ questions about his status at every campaign stop here and in Ohio earlier in the day.

Although the vice president declined to be specific, he confirmed that he had discussed his options with President Bush and that the President is fully committed to having him as his running mate.

“It is no longer debated,” Quayle said.

He also dismissed reports that some Republican Party officials last week discussed with Bush the possibility of finding a new running mate.

Such talk, he said, “goes with the territory. It goes with the office. It’s an awkward office. You are No. 2. You are there to support the President.”

Quayle also disputed the assessment by Ross Perot that the U.S. economy is on the edge of a severe recession or depression. The Texas billionaire made the assertion last week, shortly after quitting his independent bid for the presidency.

“The sky is not falling in,” Quayle said. “We are not on the verge of a depression.”

But Quayle heard a far-from-rosy report during a discussion with Chicago-area home builders here.

One told him that, despite the lowest mortgage interest rates in nearly two decades, “affordability is still a problem.” Another told Quayle that there are very few “trade-ups,” which the builder said reflects a lack of consumer confidence in the economy.

Quayle conceded that the public is “not sure they are going to be better off next year than this year.”

He took the opportunity to push Bush’s proposal, made in the State of the Union Address in February, to provide a $5,000 tax credit to first-time home buyers. If enacted, Quayle predicted it would lead to 250,000 new housing starts and 600,000 new jobs.

“This is one way to get the economy going,” Quayle said.

Campaigning earlier in the day in Cincinnati, Quayle chided Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton for saying that the nation’s economic decline had led to America becoming “a mockery” to the rest of the world.

Calling it “a regrettable statement,” Quayle said Clinton “ought to apologize,” adding, “America is still the greatest country in the world.”

Quayle has scheduled a trip to California in two weeks. One appearance that is still being negotiated is an address before the American Bar Assn., which will be holding its annual meeting in San Francisco.

Sources said Bush had been invited, but turned it down. And now Quayle is negotiating to speak as the President’s substitute. Quayle spoke at the ABA annual meeting last year, making a controversial speech in which he called for wholesale legal reforms to curb what he described as a “litigation explosion.”

As he told the National Conference of State Legislators in Cincinnati on Monday: “Not a whole lot has been done (since then) to address the problem.”

Quayle drew scattered boos and hisses when he called for a term limitation on members of Congress and criticized the National Education Assn., which has endorsed Clinton and opposes Bush’s education reform proposals.

Afterward, Quayle acknowledged that he heard the voices of dissent, saying: “Let’s have a debate on education. Let’s have a debate on whether we should limit the terms of the President. Let’s have a debate on how we’re going to generate jobs and economic growth.”

In downtown Cincinnati, on his way to that meeting, the vice president stopped in a bakery and had coffee with four women, including one, on her way to a job interview, who expressed her anxieties about the economy.

“Have confidence in the President,” Quayle told the women. “It’s not that we are ready to go over a cliff.”