Quayle Plays Morality Card Again in Announcing Run for Presidency

Former Vice President Dan Quayle, returning to his small-town roots as if he had never left, formally launched his bid for president Wednesday with an attack on Washington and a vow to restore moral authority to the White House.

Speaking in the jampacked gymnasium of his high school alma mater, Quayle took aim at the “self-anointed,” “the politicians in Washington” and, most pointedly, “the dishonest decade of Bill Clinton and Al Gore” in a combative address tossed like a hand grenade in the face of his foes.

On the day President Clinton was impeached by the House, Quayle noted, Vice President Gore suggested Clinton would be remembered as one of the nation’s greatest presidents.

“What arrogance,” Quayle scoffed. “What disdain for the values that parents are trying to teach their children. What contempt for the rule of law.”

Invoking the words President Bush used to launch the Persian Gulf War, Quayle went on: “This shall not stand. Starting in this town, in this place, at this hour, we will fight back.”

The 52-year-old Quayle enters the GOP contest a decided underdog, a rather unusual situation for a former vice president, especially given the dearth of national campaign experience by the two nominal front-runners--Texas Gov. George W. Bush and former Red Cross President Elizabeth Hanford Dole.

More than any other Republican hopeful, however, Quayle’s reputation widely precedes him--to both the aid and detriment of his candidacy.

A household name in a large field, Quayle comes closest among the major contestants “to reflecting the thinking” of core Republican Party voters, said Eddie Mahe, a veteran GOP strategist who is not aligned with any candidate. “He’s totally consistent, he doesn’t cut-and-switch on you and a lot of social conservatives know that and support him because of it.”

But at the same time, Mahe added, “His biggest challenge is to demonstrate electability. . . . A lot of people still say he’s too dumb.”

Mahe considers that a bum rap, but Quayle’s greatest challenge may be overcoming a seemingly unshakable image of intellectual ineptitude. Not surprisingly, the late-night comedians who spent years feasting on Quayle’s gaffes and malapropisms have greeted his candidacy with lip-smacking relish.

The former Indiana senator burst uncertainly on the national scene in the summer of 1988 when then-Vice President Bush surprised even some of his closest campaign advisors by tapping Quayle as his running mate. Quayle weathered a rocky campaign and, once elected, drew more notice for assorted missteps--most famously misspelling “potato” during a New Jersey classroom visit--than for any substantive contribution to Bush’s single term.

Perhaps his most celebrated moment as vice president was a purposeful attack on a fictional television character--remarks which were widely derided at the time but which has since become a point of pride for Quayle.

Speaking in 1992 to a San Francisco audience, he criticized the casual morals of unwed mother Murphy Brown. He plans to revisit that speech in another San Francisco appearance next month. With no small delight, Quayle noted Wednesday, “Murphy Brown is gone, and I’m still around fighting for the American family.”

Indeed, for all the indignities Quayle suffered, the relentless mockery won him a sympathetic following among many GOP loyalists, particularly religious conservatives. “There’s an awful lot of goodwill for Dan Quayle among the Republican primary electorate,” said conservative strategist William Kristol, who served as Quayle’s vice presidential chief of staff. “He has the big advantage that many Republican voters wish him well, they want him to do well.”

Quayle himself believes the barbs he absorbed confer on him one of his best credentials for winning the White House. “I’ve been tested,” he said in an interview on the eve of his announcement. “I’ve been through the meat grinder, and it’s not important whether you get knocked down in life. What’s important is whether you get up and keep fighting.”

Quayle has been plotting a run for president almost since leaving office in 1993. Aside from making the obligatory rounds of banquets and party gatherings, he good-naturedly spoofed his spelling problems in a potato chip advertisement and penned an autobiography, “Standing Tall.”

In January 1995, Quayle’s comeback was briefly sidetracked when he was hospitalized with life-threatening blood clots in his lungs. He subsequently had his appendix removed after doctors detected a benign tumor.

Notwithstanding those health problems, Quayle appeared poised to declare his presidential candidacy for the 1996 campaign a few weeks later. Instead, he abruptly abandoned his plans. He cited family reasons at the time, but close advisors conceded that a lack of money and organizational difficulties were the major reasons for his decision.

Since then, Quayle has assiduously laid the groundwork for his current bid. Most crucially, he has cultivated solid support in New Hampshire, site of the nation’s first primary.

Along the way, he moved from Indiana to the booming Sun Belt state of Arizona, where he spent part of his youth. Even so, a review of contributions to Quayle’s political committees for CNN and The Times by the Virginia-based Campaign Study Group shows he continues to draw the vast bulk of his financial support from his native state.

And when it came to formally declaring his candidacy, Quayle returned to the Hoosier State and the small town where he and his wife, Marilyn, hung out their shingle 25 years ago as a pair of freshly minted lawyers.

In his speech at Huntington North High School, Quayle reached for the inevitable metaphor, citing the movie “Hoosiers,” which told the story of a scrappy team that defied the odds to win the state basketball championship.

“They beat the big shots. They were the underdogs. They beat all the big names,” Quayle said to rising cheers from several thousand supporters. “They were determined. They were focused and they prevailed and they won, and I’ll win!”

Tactically, Quayle has sought to position himself to the right of Bush and Dole, as well as the more centrist Lamar Alexander, Tennessee’s ex-governor, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)

Reviving the supply-side economics of Reagan, Quayle calls for a 30% across-the-board tax cut and has taken a relatively hard line on abortion, saying he would only select a running mate and appoint Supreme Court justices who share his opposition to abortion rights.

Although Quayle has sought to make foreign policy and his experience as vice president a central part of his candidacy, he has been overshadowed of late by McCain, who was among the first to call for introducing U.S. ground troops in the Balkans.

Quayle has taken a more equivocal stance on the crisis, suggesting European troops should take the lead in any ground war. He drew a prolonged ovation Wednesday by suggesting the U.S. should not get involved “in every civil war around the world.”

But that was a rare reference to the conflict in Yugoslavia, save for a veiled jab at Gov. Bush, whose initial comments on Kosovo underscored his lack of experience on the world stage. “We can ill afford to have another president who has inexperience when it comes to foreign policy,” Quayle said. “You can only get so much from the briefing books and crash courses. You need experience.”

Reflecting the low expectations surrounding Quayle’s candidacy, even within Republican circles, GOP analyst Jack Pitney suggested victory may lie somewhere short of actually capturing the nomination. “If he silences the laughter, he can count that as a victory,” said Pitney.

But Quayle insists he wants more than respect. “I have no objective other than to win the nomination and win the presidency,” he said in the pre-announcement interview.

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Profile: Dan Quayle

* Born: Feb. 4, 1947, in Indianapolis, Ind.

* Education: Bachelor’s degree in political science, DePauw University, Indiana, 1969. Law degree, Indiana University Law School (night school program), 1974.

* Career highlights: Indiana National Guard, 1969-1975; worked for the Indiana attorney general and governor, 1970-73; associate publisher and general manager of the Huntington Indiana Herald-Press, 1974-76; represented Indiana’s 4th congressional district, 1976-80; U.S. senator from Indiana, 1980-1988; U.S. vice president, 1989-1993; wrote “Standing Firm,” 1994; coauthor of “The American Family: Discovering the Values which Make Us Strong,” 1996.

* Family: Married to Marilyn (Tucker). Two sons (24 and 22), one daughter (20). His father’s family owned the company that made Lincoln Logs, the building toy. His mother came from the Pulliam newspaper publishing family.

* Quote: “When I left the White House, the United States was clearly the undisputed superpower. But we were more than that. The American president and the office of the American presidency had the moral authority to lead, to make decisions. . . . Today, the White House looks a lot different.”

Compiled by Times researcher Tricia Ford