Quayle Mixes Politics, Nostalgia in Hometown : Campaign: Placid visit is a contrast to 1988, when hostility erupted between residents and press corps.

Vice President Dan Quayle is reintroducing himself to America, and where better to start than the small town that reared him but yet, in 1988, came to represent the worst of the national political firestorm that nearly consumed him.

The last time he left a GOP convention and came to Huntington, a town of 17,000 in the corn country of northeast Indiana, Quayle found himself encircled by reporters who fired a barrage of questions about his Vietnam War-era service in the National Guard.

As the questions persisted, thousands of townspeople began screaming epithets at the reporters, and then they threatened physical violence.

On Saturday, Quayle returned home from his second convention as the vice presidential nominee and embarked on what he had expected the first time around--a placid and sentimental journey that ended in a small town’s embrace.

Accompanied by his wife, Marilyn, and their three children, Quayle stopped by his boyhood home to chat with the current residents. He posed with his wife at his old elementary school, wandered with friends down the town’s main street and then headed to the old courthouse where the contentiousness had exploded in 1988.

Beaming and buoyant, the vice president wasted no time reminding his neighbors.

“Remember back in 1988, we had a few from the national media that visited us?” he asked. The boos began to build.

“If you’ll notice, this time around there’s a different crowd of reporters. The ones from 1988, they said they wouldn’t come back unless they had police protection.”

With a comic’s timing, Quayle paused before his punch line.

“And the police said no!”

The joke, and the speech that followed, emanated from the Quayle that people here say they are used to: a confident, rabble-rousing campaigner and most definitely not the bumbling, none-too-bright stereotype that has haunted the vice president since he became George Bush’s surprise choice as a running mate a little more than four years ago.

The small-town backdrop--and its history as a media-bashing zone--made Huntington the perfect locale for Quayle to develop his current themes of family values and Republican suffering at the hands of errant reporters.

First there was the buildup. Quayle was not yet in town when the crowd began gathering at the courthouse square, practicing chants of “Bush-Quayle” and “four more years” with the emcee, Steve Shine, who hectored the crowd for the better part of an hour to crank up their cheering decibels.

Shine had something to prove because he was the emcee at the last Quayle rally. When this year’s crowd turned out to be rather blase about chanting, Shine helped turn up the volume.

“Do you believe the national media has been fair to Dan and Marilyn Quayle?” he asked. Roused, the crowd shouted, “No!”

“Do you believe the national media is headed and controlled by the East Coast liberal Establishment?” he asked. “Yes!” thousands roared back. One man, combining insult with Quayle’s fabled spelling error of a few weeks ago, carried a supportive sign: “The Press: Potatoe Heads,” it read.

Quayle softened slightly from the defiant anti-media tone he had taken in his Thursday night address to the Republican National Convention, but still insisted that he will “not back down a bit” from his attacks on Hollywood media moguls who he contends are helping to ruin the nation’s morals.

He also focused his attacks on Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

“Values will be a centerpiece of this campaign, and we are going to be talking about who can strengthen the families of America,” Quayle said.

“Our opponents, they believe families are better off with more government. We believe families are better off with less government.

“Send a message to Bill Clinton and the Democratic Congress: You don’t strengthen families by raising taxes. You strengthen families by letting them keep more of their own money.”

Congress was repeatedly in Quayle’s gun sights. In an allusion to Bush’s foreign policy credentials, the vice president declared that “now that we have won the Cold War, with a new Congress we can win the domestic war.”

If the gathering was partly meant to frame a new identity for Clinton, it was also meant to resurrect an old one for Quayle--that of a capable candidate with roots sunk deep in the soil of Middle America.

“Huntington is Middle America,” he said. “Growing up here, life centered around family, school, Little League, Friday night football, Saturday night basketball . . . church on Sunday and, of course, when you reached the age of 16 you were allowed to cruise the A&W; Root Beer stand.

“Here is where I learned the values that are inside me this very day. . . . We call that ‘family values’ because they come from our people and not from the halls of government.”