TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/062689/06268900.051

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NATION, Page 22

Dan Quayle's Salvage Strategy

Oddly enough, it depends on being more like Walter Mondale

By Laurence I. Barrett


    Dan Quayle visited four Central American countries last week,
promoted his usual hard line against Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega
Saavedra and Panama's Manuel Antonio Noriega, and admonished
right-wingers in El Salvador to abjure human-rights abuses. That
his efforts received routine news coverage delighted his staff.

    Why the glee over this ordinary transaction? Because Quayle
hardly qualifies as an ordinary Vice President. Since becoming
George Bush's running mate, Quayle has had to whittle away at a
monstrous burden: being tagged as Bush's first big mistake. That
he avoided gaffes last week represented progress. That news stories
concentrated on his message amounted to a major improvement.

    Quayle has been building a reputation for himself behind the
scenes too. Last month the Indiana conservative formed an unlikely
alliance with a Brooklyn liberal, Congressman Stephen Solarz, on
a complex issue. Quayle returned from a trip to Southeast Asia
convinced that the U.S. should give military assistance to Prince
Norodom Sihanouk's faction in Cambodia. Solarz shared that view.
Together they lobbied to deflect a Senate proposal to bar such aid.
Quayle's initiative surprised Solarz on two counts. "Quayle seemed
to be one of the few in the Administration who really seized the
issue," he says. And in Solarz's 15-year career, it was only the
second time a Vice President approached him on a serious matter;
on the first occasion, it was Walter Mondale.

    Quayle in fact resembles the activist Mondale model of a Vice
President far more than the invisible-man version perfected by
Bush. The difference is the heart of Quayle's salvation strategy.
He staggered through the election branded an overprivileged
airhead. As candidates or incumbents, Vice Presidents often attract
some derision. For the young golf addict, it was a nearly lethal
dose. "I came to the office adding a bit of luster to that
ridicule," he muses. Allies advised him to go underground, to avoid
risks. But with escalating speculation that Bush would dump him in
1992, Quayle and his advisers decided that inactivity was the
biggest risk of all. "We had to move before the clay hardened,"
says his chief of staff, William Kristol.

    To remold the image, Quayle would have to be seen, first as an
effective inside player and outside spokesman. With encouragement
from Bush and White House chief of staff John Sununu, Quayle became
a voluble participant in strategy sessions. He lined up with Sununu
and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, for instance, to support a
relatively high budget for the Strategic Defense Initiative. Then
it was Quayle who laid out in a major speech the Administration's
line on SDI.

    While never deviating from basic Bush policy in public, Quayle
places himself a few degrees to the President's right, acting the
conservative enforcer. It was Quayle who talked about the Soviets'
"hatred of God." While in Central America, he inveighed against the
"axis" of dictatorships in Panama, Nicaragua and Cuba, and posed
with a grenade launcher that he said the Sandinistas had shipped
to Marxist rebels in El Salvador.

    Quayle insists he never distorts Bush's basic themes. His more
controversial statements, he argues, are part of the "rhetorical
role that a Vice President can have. The Vice President can say and
do things the President shouldn't."

    While this tactic reinforces Quayle's ties with conservatives,
it has barely helped his national image. His frat-house mien,
accentuated by an appearance younger than his 42 years, is
compounded by his reliance on ebullient cliches when he lacks a
staff-written script. Too often he comes across as a kid struggling
gamely with an adult role. While some surveys have shown a modest
improvement in the public's general perception of him, he still
gets negative marks on the critical question attaching to any Vice
President: Is he qualified to assume the presidency? A May Gallup
poll reported that 52% of Americans think not.

    Until recently the press seized on every blooper as
underscoring his lack of heft. A few published put-downs were
inaccurate, including a joke reported as fact -- that he thought
Latin is the language of Latin America. Still, Quayle commits
enough miscues on his own to supply critics with ammunition.
Addressing the United Negro College Fund, whose motto is "A mind
is a terrible thing to waste," he lost himself in a self-indicting
verbal fog: "What a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have
a mind. How true that is."

    "There is a tendency when one is very confident to be verbose,"
he explains. "It's a matter of discipline." Verbosity is also a
dodge for anxious politicians who lack thoughtful things to say.
Nonetheless, the Vice President's newly restored confidence seems
genuine. It is based, he says, on Bush's strong support of him and
on his age: "I'm going to have time to cast the true identification
of Dan Quayle out to the general public." In five months as Vice
President, Quayle has demonstrated to fellow insiders that he is
an effective Administration operator. But it will take more than
that, and more than the discipline he is striving to attain, to
create that great political intangible, national stature.