Quayle Reportedly Ending Race for Presidential Nomination

Former Vice President Dan Quayle, bowing to the seemingly inevitable, will abandon his uphill fight for the Republican presidential nomination, aides said Sunday.

A formal announcement is set for today in Phoenix, where the former Indiana senator now lives.

Lagging badly in both fund-raising and public opinion polls, Quayle had recently scaled back his campaign to focus entirely on New Hampshire, the site of next winter’s first presidential primary.

While confident of a strong showing in New Hampshire, where he enjoyed the support of former Gov. John Sununu and friendly coverage from Manchester’s influential newspaper the Union Leader, Quayle realized “he would not have the resources necessary” to wage a competitive national campaign, said one senior campaign strategist.

“Vice President Quayle has always said if he concluded that his campaign would be unable to achieve its objective of winning the Republican nomination, at that point he would stop asking his supporters to expend their energies on his behalf,” the aide said.

Quayle, 52, made his decision after consulting with his wife, Marilyn--long one of his key political advisors--and campaign manager Kyle McSlarrow, according to sources.

With Quayle’s exit, the GOP field will shrink to eight candidates and may be winnowed further if commentator Patrick J. Buchanan pursues the Reform Party nomination.

Given his weak fund-raising and asterisk-level standing in the polls, Quayle’s departure is expected to have little impact on a race dominated by Texas Gov. George W. Bush. In a straw poll last month in Iowa, Quayle finished eighth out of nine candidates competing.

“He was irrelevant as far as the race was going, and so his departure is basically irrelevant,” said Stuart Rothenberg, a Washington analyst. “Basically, he’s acknowledging--finally--what we all knew: that he simply could not overcome the jokes about his misspelling ‘potato’ and his image as a political lightweight.”

From a historical perspective, however, Quayle’s exit is noteworthy because it marks the first time in half a century that an incumbent or former vice president has been denied his party’s nomination.

Personally, the abandonment of Quayle’s longshot bid marks the latest setback in a once-charmed career that seemed almost perpetually star-crossed after he was plucked from obscurity to become then-Vice President George Bush’s 1988 running mate.

Although Quayle enjoyed a solid reputation within the Senate as an expert on arms control and job-training--and was renown as a political giant killer back in Indiana--his vice presidential candidacy was immediately consumed by a controversy over his Vietnam-era National Guard service. During the campaign, Quayle also committed a series of faux pas that left him with an indelible image as a pratfall-prone bumbler.

Perhaps the low point came when he misspelled “potato”--he added an “e”--at a New Jersey grade school.

Another famous moment came in 1992, when he set off a national debate on single-parenthood and Hollywood mores by attacking TV’s fictional Murphy Brown. Although many now agree with the points Quayle made, at the time his remarks were widely treated as yet another gaffe.