AND I QUOTE / What Political Books Are Saying : THE AMERICAN FAMILY: Discovering the Values that Make Us Strong,<i> By Dan Quayle and Diane Medved (HarperCollins: $25; 283 pp.)</i>

“Although there’s no lack of news these days about families, much of what we hear and read is bad. Daily reports tell of urban fears, economic anxieties, high divorce rates, and children suffering from abuse and neglect. The tabloid culture searches endlessly for deviant behavior, unhealthy relationships, hate-filled marriages, and families near collapse. . . . This book offers the unreported news about the American family. The news that, for all the poundings it’s taken over the last few decades, the family is still a resilient force and a shield against adversity.”

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You’re still watching too much bad TV and reading too many tabloids, Dan. Why keep picking this fight just for the sake of it? Of course millions of us have “functioning” families--even us smart alecks in the press. You and Medved--a twice-married psychologist whose earlier book, “The Case Against Divorce,” has been described as “pre-feminist”--might be surprised at what swell children we’re raising. Your profiles of five such families, including, yes, a single-parent family, are nice enough. But hardly “unreported.” If you’d just turn off “Oprah,” you would read of their struggles and triumphs often.

AND FURTHERMORE: Quick, Dan, if Mom takes the bus at 7 a.m. for her job as a maid and Dad walks home from the unemployment line at 5:30 p.m., how much do they pay for a quart of milk to feed Junior?