Quayle Vows Not to Forget California Defense Workers

Vice President Dan Quayle conceded Wednesday that the White House is “disappointed” in the economy, but promised thousands of unemployed California defense workers that the Administration “will not abandon you.”

In a speech to the San Diego Rotary Club that was touted as a “major economic address” but ended up as a deliberately colorless recitation of current Administration policies, Quayle said that President Bush’s economic program offers far more hope for displaced workers than Democratic nominee Bill Clinton’s plan.

But the speech offered no new initiatives and had no concrete promises for the defense industry, other than a pledge to resist further cuts in the Pentagon budget.

President Bush is scheduled to deliver what has been described as a make-or-break economic speech in Detroit today. Quayle aides said the vice president was determined not to “plow new ground” on the economy in advance of the President’s speech--and he succeeded.

“Every speech cannot be a huge speech, especially when the President is giving a speech on the same subject the next day,” Quayle press secretary David Beckwith said.

The speech followed a sparsely attended early morning rally to mark the opening of a reelection campaign headquarters in San Diego. The Quayle staff had predicted that 1,000 to 2,000 people would attend; subtracting the band and the cheerleaders, fewer than 400 showed up.

The rally was emblematic of the problems the GOP ticket faces in California. If the vice president cannot attract a crowd in traditionally solid-Republican San Diego, the President has little hope of carrying the state.

“The San Diego Republican Party is not what it once was,” a senior Quayle aide said. “We have been accustomed to having Orange County and San Diego as rock solid. This year, as a result of the state of the economy and other things, it’s not as healthy as it once was.”

Quayle appeared only days after a new San Diego Union Tribune poll showed Bush trailing Clinton by 6 percentage points in the county--45% to 39%. That amounts to a statistical tie, because the poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 4 points. But it is still an astonishing turnaround from 1988, when Bush carried the county by 22 points--60% to 38%.

A top Quayle aide all but conceded defeat in California, saying it is “probably the worst state for us” among those the Republicans are contesting.

In the Rotary Club speech, Quayle said that he was “not trying to paint a rosy scenario” on the economy.

He then repeated the familiar litany of Bush Administration policies that are supposed to drag the economy out of the current slough--lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper health care and fewer lawyers.

He warned that Clinton’s economic plan would make things worse, citing a study by the University of New Mexico predicting that the Democrat’s planned cuts in defense spending would cost 294,000 jobs in California alone.

On Tuesday, in an interview on KTLA-TV in Los Angeles, Quayle said that the President’s decision to raise taxes in 1990 “put this country right into a recession. We’re struggling to get out of it. He’s learned. . . . He made one mistake and he’ll never make it again and it’s been painful for him personally.”