Future Role Uncertain : Scorn of Quayle Builds Despite GOP Victory

WASHINGTON — He is a sure-fire laugh line for Johnny Carson. He is a target of almost nightly gibes on the David Letterman show. Even the stately BBC news makes jokes about him.

In a situation unparalleled in recent memory, Vice President-elect Dan Quayle has become the butt of increasing ridicule and scorn in the days since he and George Bush scored their sweeping electoral victory.

On the Sunday morning after the balloting that Quayle said would vindicate his controversial candidacy, his 14-year-old son, Tucker, came downstairs with a gloomy report for dad: “They’re still making fun of you on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ ” When Tucker repeated some of the jokes, according to an aide who recounted the incident, the vice president-elect was unamused. “Those aren’t funny,” Quayle told his son.

Americans have long reserved the right to make fun of their political leaders. Abraham Lincoln was savagely caricatured by his enemies, as was Harry S. Truman. Both had armies of equally fierce defenders, however.

And traditionally, even the most controversial national candidates have benefited from a surge of rally-round-the-flag, post-election good will if they were successful at the polls. Unimposing vice presidents, in particular, have been allowed to step quietly into the obscurity long associated with their office.

Quayle, however, has attracted even more derision since the Nov. 8 election than he did before. And that phenomenon--if it continues--could add to the already widespread public cynicism about government. It could also, some Republicans worry, become a chink in President-elect Bush’s own armor, a point of vulnerability for his all-too-numerous Democratic foes.

Adding to Quayle’s discomfort is the fact that, far from rushing to his defense as they did during the campaign, Bush and other Republicans have often seemed to leave him to twist in the wind. Occasionally, they seem to add to his humiliation themselves, as President Reagan did by blandly excluding the vice president-elect from the banquet for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Similarly, no one in the Bush camp intervened when Quayle was not invited to join Bush at the head table during a recent Washington dinner hosted by a group promoting literacy. Embarrassed by the slight, Quayle and his wife sat with ABC News President Roone Arledge.

“The most telling picture” of Quayle’s role came the day the new President-elect returned in triumph to Washington, said a well-placed Republican here. “Bush went to the White House to see Reagan and Dan Quayle was three steps behind, with the women. That summed it all up.”

“I can’t remember, going way back in history, a vice president being kept under wraps the way Quayle is,” said Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. “What we’re going to see is the prisoner of Massachusetts Avenue.” The vice president’s official residence is on the grounds of the old Naval Observatory located on a hilltop rising above that long boulevard several miles from the White House.

“Finding something for him to do will be difficult,” Baker said. “You can put him in a glass case with a hammer next to it, and a sign saying: ‘In case of damage to the President, break glass.”’

Aides Optimistic

The vice president-elect and his closest aides contend the worst of all this will soon be over.

They blame Quayle’s wounded public image--which grew more negative as the campaign progressed, polls show--on a harsh Democratic campaign that devoted $5 million to anti-Quayle television advertisements alone. “We didn’t spend a penny to respond,” Quayle told reporters before the election.

As for the public scorn that has followed the political ridicule, aides say that Quayle’s “thick skin” remains intact. “He just lets it roll right off him,” says spokesman Jeff Nesbit.

After all, Nesbit said: “Ridicule often is heaped on vice presidents because they don’t speak out on their own behalf and they don’t wield much power.”

“This is the season, and Quayle’s an easy target,” said former White House speech writer Ken Khachigian. “But David Letterman and Johnny Carson are not going to be able to make a living for four years cracking jokes about Dan Quayle.

“Those in the arts and the television community didn’t pull their lever for George Bush,” Khachigian added, “and this is one of their ways of striking back.”

Seeking Good Staff

Advisers to Bush and Quayle also dispute as premature the contention that Quayle is being kept silent. The delays in building his staff reflect not neglect or reluctance of others to serve with him, aides say, but rather Quayle’s own determination to enlist top-notch people. And his apparent distance from the Bush staff is portrayed as the President-elect’s determination to give proper priority to his own Cabinet decisions.

“As far as I’m concerned, Sen. Quayle is getting himself ready to be an active member of the Administration,” John H. Sununu, newly named White House chief of staff, said in an interview with The Times.

“A lot of this is just going to be ancient history after awhile,” agreed Mitch Daniels, a former top aide to Quayle and former White House political director.

“George Bush wasn’t put in charge of the drug program on Day One, and he wasn’t put in charge of the privatization task force on Day One,” Daniels said. “We’re not even to Day One yet.”

“The focus right now is on the President-elect as it should be, and Quayle is doing those things that he needs to do,” said David Prosperi, Quayle’s campaign press secretary and now a spokesman for the Bush transition team.

If a substantive role is being planned for Quayle, it is not yet visible.

The vice president-elect has met only twice with Bush, has not been told what he will do after Jan. 20, and knows only that he will take charge of a relatively powerless Space Council. He has not yet begun to assemble a senior staff.

Instead, Quayle has remained in his transition office on the third floor of a townhouse across the street from the White House “preparing himself to become vice president” by reading up on space policy and receiving daily national security briefings, said spokesman Nesbit.

But because he has been given little guidance on what to prepare for, Quayle has spent much of his time in meetings with fellow conservatives such as Rep. Jack Kemp and former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick--meetings at which aides say he listens but rarely speaks at length.

When appointments were slack on the Friday after the election, Quayle left. An aide said he had gone home. Actually, he had headed for the golf course.

“You’ve got Dan Quayle sitting out there in Nowheresville,” said another GOP source. “There’s been no effort to try to figure out what to do with him. . . . I see Dan Quayle just sitting there waiting.”

Some Republican sources have even expressed concern that Quayle may be ill-equipped to perform the traditional vice presidential role as emissary to far-away places.

Cites Humphrey Role

Asked about that, a former Quayle adviser responded defensively. “Well,” the adviser said, “Lyndon Johnson wouldn’t let Hubert Humphrey attend many funerals either.”

Quayle’s stature is such that when the New York Times published a scholarly Op-Ed piece noting that members of the Electoral College were not legally bound to vote for Quayle, rumors spread that a dump-Quayle campaign had in fact been mounted.

Other Republican activists are already worried about the next go-round. At least one party leader remarked before the election that the Bush team’s first job after Election Day, 1988, would be “to find out how we dump Quayle” before the 1992 election.

To turn the negative situation around, Quayle’s defenders agree, will take time and careful effort.

“The first thing to avoid,” declared former aide Daniels, “is any attempt at a quick fix.

“Anything that gives the impression of gimmickry or undue alarm would detract from the image of maturity that Quayle wants to build,” Daniels says. “The core of the critique is his alleged immaturity, and maturity is a quality demonstrated by patience and demonstrated over a period of time.”

Will ‘Take Time’

“You can’t turn this kind of thing around overnight,” another former adviser said. “It’s going to take time.”

Those involved in any effort to retrieve Quayle’s standing face a problem:

Quayle’s advisers believe voters will become persuaded of his competence only after he makes a substantial contribution to the Administration. “You can do some imagery and some puffery to help him,” one adviser says, “but I think the things that help sustain any real change in public opinion are going to be his accomplishments.”

Yet Bush and his advisers thus far have shown little willingness to grant Quayle such a substantive role. “I don’t see any suggestion Bush or the Bush team wants to change the visibility of Dan Quayle,” says a senior Republican source. “You’re not only cutting his legs out from a policy standpoint, you’re making him look like a buffoon.”

There has been at least one Quayle success. After Quayle sat in on a meeting between Bush and British Prime Minister Thatcher last week, a member of Thatcher’s entourage ventured that Quayle had made a favorable impression “to everybody’s surprise.”

“The P.M. was much more favorably impressed than she had been led to expect,” the British official said.

The same cannot be said for the British Broadcasting Corp. It concluded its evening broadcast one day last week by noting that Mickey Mouse had attained his 60th birthday. It was not true, the BBC noted laconically, that the famous mouse marked the occasion by wearing a Dan Quayle wristwatch.

Nevertheless, Quayle’s advisers believe that he can secure a substantive role only if he surrounds himself with a staff that is knowledgeable in the ways of Washington and is respected by Bush’s White House staff.

Experienced Aides Depart

Fred F. Fielding, a respected Washington attorney and a former counsel to President Reagan, was appointed last week to head the office of the vice president-elect and the First Lady on Bush’s transition. But the experienced Republican hands appointed to manage Quayle’s vice presidential campaign have long since departed for the private sector or the Bush team, and no one of their stature has yet signed on permanently with Quayle.

That has left him to rely chiefly on a relatively inexperienced Senate staff, for which Bush’s advisers and Quayle’s former team have little respect.

“If he had capable staff behind him, he would have alleviated the problem of not being invited to the Thatcher dinner,” one former aide said. “It’s a problem of wrapping himself up with people from Indiana who are not attuned to the ways of Washington.

“A quality staff is going to be the key to getting out of the hole he’s in,” the former adviser said.

“I would find Dan Quayle a really strong chief of staff to try to help him,” one prominent Republican source said. “I look at him as still kind of awe-struck. What will happen when he sneaks off like he used to, to play golf?”

Thus far at least, the laughter at Quayle’s expense has not become a problem for the President-elect himself. And at least some scholars doubt it will.

Notes Context

“It’s not a terribly healthy thing,” said Stephen Hess, a scholar of the presidency at the Brookings Institution. “But let’s put this into context. The vice president doesn’t do much and isn’t expected to do much.”

He pointed out that the vice president’s official duties are limited: presiding over the Senate, voting in the Senate in the case of a tie, and standing by to take over for a fallen President.

Then there are the tasks to which he is frequently assigned: attending foreign funerals and taking part in political activities.

“If all these jokes get in the way of that, they’re bad,” Hess said. But, he predicted, they will pass. As evidence, he pointed to a similar image problem that confronted the Reagan Administration.

“You started with Nancy Reagan looking like a clotheshorse and she ended up as a virtual drug czar,” said Hess, a former aide to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. “If you could do it with Nancy Reagan, you can do it with Dan Quayle.”