Quayle Still Maintaining Focus on Vice Presidential Debate

With a speech, visual props and even jokes, Vice President Dan Quayle and his campaign continued working hard Thursday to get across its view that he won the vice presidential debate with Sen. Al Gore.

At a rally at the Owensboro Grain Co., Quayle insisted that Gore had failed to defend his running mate, Bill Clinton, when Quayle attacked Clinton’s character and truthfulness at the debate in Atlanta on Tuesday.

Now, “it’s two days after the debate and Sen. Gore still refuses to defend the integrity of Bill Clinton,” said Quayle. “Since Bill Clinton refuses to defend his integrity, tonight Bill Clinton will have to defend his own integrity”--a reference to Thursday night’s presidential debate.

Quayle was introduced, as “Dan Quayle, the man who won the debate by a knockout.” Overhead, a tiny plane towed a sign that read, “Dan, the Great Debater.”

Quayle aides seemed to have a wealth of jokes to illustrate the same point. When a reporter asked what Quayle had said when he spoke to Gore after the debate, Quayle’s press secretary didn’t miss a beat. “He said, ‘Al, I ate your lunch,’ ” David Beckwith replied.

Quayle aides, meanwhile, parried Gore’s charge that the Administration was concealing a scandal larger than Watergate in the “Iraqgate” affair.

Iraqgate refers to allegations that the Administration tried to cover up its prewar dealings with Iraq--including whether it withheld key documents from Congress that would describe the extent of that assistance, whether other countries were encouraged to supply Iraq with arms, and whether the Administration blocked or restricted the criminal investigation of $5 billion in loans to Iraq by the Atlanta branch of Italy’s Banca Nazionale del Lavoro.

Beckwith called Gore’s charge “just nonsense.”

“They’re starting to flail away almost desperately,” Beckwith said. “It shows that the character issue is starting to hurt and the race is tightening.”

“It’s amazing how many alleged controversies have arisen now two weeks before the election,” he said. “If Gore felt so strongly about this, why hadn’t he confronted the vice president in the debate the other night?”

Quayle visited western Kentucky because the election is relatively close in the state, and because the state is a stronghold of so-called Reagan Democrats--those Democrats who have voted Republican in presidential elections since 1980. Quayle is scheduled to travel to Rocky Mount and Fayetteville, N.C., today.