It was a day straight out of Republican central casting: First Dan Quayle`s lost puppy miraculously reappeared, then the vice president spent 16 hours hopscotching around four states, raising almost $300,000 for Republican candidates and coffers. There were no particularly tough or rude questions from local media, and there were several heavily photographed ”impromptu”
stops at a Denny`s restaurant, a firehouse and a high school football field. Finally, at his last stop near Dallas, Quayle was honored for his work in fighting breast cancer.
That is the kind of political trip that is good for the party, good for the local candidates, and good for Dan Quayle, who, it should be noted, is steadily building an invaluable network of cross-country contacts and IOUs.
And, except for locating the lost puppy, which had run away the night before Quayle left home, it`s reasonably typical of how the vice president has been spending his time as Election Day creeps closer.
His aides are quick to tote up statistics on his travels: 45 states visited since he took office, some $6.5 million raised on the road in 1989 and $8 million so far this year. E. Spencer Abraham, deputy chief of staff, says he has visited 75 cities with Quayle since joining his operation in February. ”And that doesn`t count the doubles”-cities visited more than once-he said with a sigh.
All this travel and fundraising goes with the vice presidential territory, of course. But for Quayle, it`s also a chance to repair his battered 1988 campaign image and forge links with state Republican leaders and workers. In addition, the staunchly conservative vice president can keep alive, or in some cases try to resuscitate, the administration`s ties with the right wing of the party, which has been restive if not downright rebellious over the budget.
And if President Bush is entertaining any ideas of dropping Quayle from the 1992 ticket (one recent poll showed 69 percent of the American public uncomfortable with the idea of Quayle as president), the kind of grass-roots support he engenders from these trips may save his job.
Quayle himself is circumspect about what returns, perhaps even a presidential bid in 1996, might lie down the road for him as a result of all this intensive activity. ”I`m making valuable contacts,” he said in an interview in his cabin aboard Air Force Two as he flew last week from Milwaukee to Oklahoma City. ”We`ll see what happens. Politics is interesting. . . .”
Pressed about his plans for 1996, he says only: ”I`m doing what is expected of me. . . . Obviously, it gives me a lot of flexibility down the road.”
Not everyone, of course, is impressed, beginning with the Democrats. Mark Gearan, executive director of the Democratic Governors` Association, said:
”Cash is all he can deliver. His coattails are about as long as a bikini. There`s no evidence he takes voters with him. In 1989 he campaigned (for Republican gubernatorial candidates) in both New Jersey and Virginia and lost both.”
In his own party, Kevin Phillips, a Republican political analyst and author, is only marginally more supportive. ”I don`t think Quayle is doing a bad job in the traditional vice presidential role,” he said. ”He`s just not elevating it. I don`t think it changes his unfortunate status quo. . . .
”For Quayle, it`s not enough to be an OK vice president, doing inconsequential things. He has to affirm, reshape his image, and that`s going to be difficult. . . . Quayle can go into state races and he may pick up some IOUs, but that doesn`t build his national image. (He`s got to) stop being a joke on the Johnny Carson show.”
Quayle himself is sanguine about his being such a continuously popular target on late-night TV. ”Hey, look,” he says, ”vice presidents are there to be kicked around, ever since John Adams. You become rather thick-skinned being vice president. If you`re not, you can`t do your job very well.”
In fact, a survey by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Washington organization that monitors media, showed that from Jan. 1 to Sept. 15, Bush was the target of the most late-night jokes, 122, compared to 110 for Quayle and 69 for Washington Mayor Marion Barry.
Quayle says that he loves to campaign, that as a young congressional candidate he especially enjoyed going to bowling alleys to talk to people, and that he still likes to ”pick up things on the road I think are helpful.”
These ”things,” of course, are often heavily favorable to the administration.
One message he said he picked up last week as he whizzed from Rochester, Minn., to Milwaukee to Oklahoma City and then on to Dallas was that ”people by and large blame Congress, and not the president, for the budget.”
Phrase control
This also is not confrontational campaigning. Generally, there is no opposition, aside from the occasional straggling protesters who show up outside events with signs that seem left over from another decade, such as,
”U.S. Out of El Salvador” and ”Stop the War.”
Quayle is speaking to the committed. Most, after all, have paid $100 a head or more to hear him speak, and they are there to praise, not bury, him.
His speech is basically the same as he moves from city to city: He endorses the local candidate, chews out the Democrats, bashes Iraq`s Saddam Hussein, praises Bush, rallies Republican troops. In recent weeks, he has been adding a new element: a proposal to limit terms of public officials.
”Friends,” he intoned at each stop last week, ”there is more turnover in the Supreme Soviet than in the House of Representatives.” Noting that the president could only serve two terms, he added, ”What`s good for the president is good for the Congress.”
While his delivery is confident, there still are the occasional tortured turns of phrase. In Milwaukee, for example, he described the plan to limit political terms as ”an idea whose time was about to arrive.”
Or he may drift into numbing bureaucratic lingo, as when he started producing phrases like ”defense capability” while speaking to kindergarten students in Milwaukee. During the entire time he spoke, one little girl stood with her fingers in her mouth, pulling her face into contortions.
Quayle`s contacts with the local media on these trips generally prove beneficial. At most stops, he schedules a press roundtable, and it is these sessions, along with his speech, that provide the fodder for the next day`s local news stories. And it is that coverage, more than anything reported by the still-suspect national press, that matters to the candidate and the local party stalwarts.
So Quayle takes questions at each stop for 15 or 20 minutes, and they range from local issues (education in Milwaukee, oil in Oklahoma) to national (the budget agreement, the Persian Gulf), with a heavy sprinkling of what journalists call ”softballs.” For example, he was asked at one stop last week, ”Why is it important to have a Republican governor?”
He handles them all at least adequately if not deftly. By this time in his vice presidential career, there are few questions Quayle hasn`t heard, few that would require him to react on his feet, and he`s prepared for the others. Making passes
Aides say that his ”impromptu” stops are also well-received in terms of local coverage although ”impromptu” is a misnomer because they have been scheduled and checked out by the Secret Service, then made to appear spontaneous.
One format Quayle particularly favors is stopping at fast-food restaurants to shake a few hands and buy a cup of coffee, an exercise that never fails to cause a commotion and sometimes a few funny encounters.
Popping into the Denny`s as he drove into Rochester, Quayle started working the tables only to pull up short, and quickly move on, when a diner in a blue plaid shirt, presumably an audio-gear salesperson, asked him, ”Say, do you need a stereo or anything?”
A woman then approached carrying a small, oblong piece of paper and asked him to sign it. Quayle turned it over and started laughing. ”I`m not signing any blank checks,” he told her.
At the front counter, a young waitress whose nametag identified her as Leslie asked reporters which one Quayle was. When he was pointed out, she observed, ”He`s good looking-for his age.” The 43-year-old Quayle later laughed uproariously when the remark was repeated to him.
In Oklahoma City, he dropped in on the Bishop McGuinness High School football practice. Taking off his dark suitcoat he asked, ”What kind of pattern are you going to run here?” and then threw three consecutive spirals, each about 30 yards, to various players. Obviously pleased with his performance, he next visited a fire station across the street and, gesturing to the field, asked several firefighters, ”You guys see that over there?”
Family matters
When he is out campaigning for local candidates, Quayle`s expenses, including Air Force Two, hotel room and staff expenses, are paid for by the candidate in question (or divided if there is more than one candidate that day). Because that tab is often $10,000 to $15,000, according to Greg Zoeller, Quayle`s director of public liaison, a good deal more must be raised if the candidate is to come out comfortably ahead.
So tickets for his speeches, which often include a lunch or dinner, can easily run into the hundreds of dollars, and there frequently are private receptions afterward for those willing to pay more. In Oklahoma City, for example, about 160 couples paid $1,000 each to have their pictures taken with Quayle.
While political operatives call $300,000 a day about right for vice presidential fundraising right before an election, it should be noted that that can be a mere drop in the party bucket compared with what Bush can do. On a two-day trip through the Midwest last month, the president raised $3.7 million, including $2 million at two Ohio stops alone.
Aides say Quayle puts few restrictions on his campaigning, other than striving to reserve Sundays to spend with his wife, Marilyn, and children Tucker, 16, Ben, 13, and Corinne, 11.
And sometimes the family has an impact on the campaigning, instead of vice versa. For example, when the Quayles` English setter puppy, Chili, vanished from the grounds of the vice presidential home last week, the children were distraught. A night of searching turned up nothing, but the next morning, as Quayle prepared to leave for a 7:20 a.m. flight to Rochester, the phone rang with the good news that neighbors had found the wayward pup.
Bundling his daughter into his car, Quayle raced over to retrieve Chili. But the puppy pickup built a 20-minute delay into his schedule, and in four cities that day, his appearances ran late by exactly 20 minutes.
