Dan Quayle's Salvage Strategy

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.