Quayle Ventures Outside Loyal GOP Bastions : Politics: New itinerary takes him to less friendly areas. But the risk is protesters will overshadow positive news of his appearances.

Held on a short leash during his disastrous 1988 campaign, Vice President Dan Quayle this year is mapping a campaign itinerary that takes him outside loyal Republican bastions and into more stops in hotly contested electoral battlegrounds.

The last week has shown the pattern. In the days immediately following last week’s Republican Convention, Quayle swung through Democrat-rich areas in north-central Florida and the “I-85 corridor” of piedmont North Carolina. Friday, he traveled to Grand Rapids, Mich., to blast the environmental positions of the Democratic presidential ticket and then campaigned in Macomb County, a suburban area northeast of Detroit that is synonymous with Ronald Reagan Democrats.

In contrast, Quayle was relegated four years ago to a circuit consisting largely of such low-risk stops as Bible Belt chambers of commerce and some of the more conservative college campuses.

“They really deep-sixed him last time,” said Michael McCurry, a Democratic strategist who was press secretary to the party’s 1988 vice presidential nominee, Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen. “This time, I think they can justly make the claim they’re being more adventurous.”

Jim Pitts, Quayle’s political director, says the new itinerary reflects the vice president’s greater self-confidence. “In 1988, the campaign was perceived more as George Bush,” Pitts said. “This year, it’s Bush-Quayle.”

Because he is such a partisan lightning rod, the obvious risk for Quayle in venturing to less friendly areas is that the dissenters will crowd out more positive TV and press coverage of his appearances.

That occurred on June 23, when Quayle visited the Pueblo del Rio housing project in South Los Angeles. A handful of protesters accused him of using the visit for a publicity stunt and, through his much publicized attack on husband-less TV mom “Murphy Brown,” insulting single mothers.

“You don’t want them to step on your message,” said an aide.

Quayle’s crowds so far have been dominated by the well-groomed Republican faithful, who cheer lustily at his perorations on family values and small government and boo as if on cue when he denounces the Clinton ticket, the Democratic “dictators” of Congress and the national media.

But his itinerary also has exposed him to a scattering of protesters, such as those who came to razz him Tuesday when a whistle-stop train tour chugged 100 miles through central North Carolina. At a stop in Salisbury, N. C., as Quayle declaimed on the need for tax cuts and traditional values, a man held up a sign that read: “It’s about the economy, stupid.”

Central North Carolina, with its large population of textile and furniture manufacturing workers and its growing group of younger, better-educated liberals, “is a place Democrats go to hold fund-raisers,” said McCurry, the Democratic strategist. “That’s riskier territory for him.”

Quayle also Tuesday held a rally in a county in South Carolina that is 30% black. There, protesters unfurled a huge banner attacking him and carried on a shouting match with others in the crowd. The verbal battle climaxed when a protester called a Republican partisan a “brown shirt.”

Quayle’s first order of business still focuses on shoring up support for the GOP ticket in conservative areas, including regions that embraced Bush challenger Patrick J. Buchanan earlier in the year. He will travel next week to Albany, Macon and Columbia, Ga., cities populated with many of the white, male “Bubba” voters whose backing Bush needs to win reelection.

But later, aides say, the campaign will spend more time in swing states in the Midwest and West, including Ohio, Illinois and California. Aides say they also expect to spend time in Louisiana, a state that, because of its proximity to Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, may become a Democratic target.

In California, the vice president must try to restore the loyalty of Orange County Republicans, some of whom have strayed toward the Democratic ticket, according to polls. Quayle plans a swing through Orange County over the Labor Day weekend.

And as Election Day nears, preliminary plans call for him to campaign in the Central Valley, which often decides which way the state goes in presidential contests.

David P. Prosperi, who was Quayle’s press secretary in 1988, vividly remembers the insults and protests that the vice president faced during his few forays into unfriendly places.

At the beginning of that year’s general election campaign, when scrutiny of his decision in the late 1960s to join the Indiana National Guard--and thus remove himself from the military draft--was at its most intense, Quayle was followed from appearance to appearance by a man in a chicken suit. He once shouted down demonstrators at a county fair.

It was such experiences that led to Quayle being put under wraps for much of the campaign.

But now, Prosperi said, “he has had four years . . . to look vice presidential, so he is running a different kind of campaign.”

Still, there are limits to Quayle’s boldness. He has cut back, for example, on the visits to inner-city schools and housing projects that he was making earlier in the summer. And when he has met with factory workers, it has been in tightly controlled settings inside defense plants, where the Administration’s views on maintaining a large Pentagon budget are viewed warmly.