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The candidates' wives have sometimes added to the problems. Marilyn Quayle, an attorney who once shared a law practice with her husband, has a flinty edge that has on occasion made her seem both tougher and smarter than the Vice President. Some consider it ironic that a woman as independent-minded as Marilyn Quayle would so outspokenly back the Republican Party's emphasis on traditional family roles during the G.O.P. convention last August.
Tipper Gore has also generated controversy. Her determined campaign against raunchy rock lyrics appeared to place her to the right of her moderate-to- liberal husband and for a time risked alienating traditional sources of Democratic political and financial support in Hollywood during her husband's 1988 presidential bid. Today, however, she talks more about homelessness, mental health and children.
During the run-up to this week's vice-presidential debate, Quayle suggested that he would be at a disadvantage because he was a product of public schools while Gore had mainly attended private schools. If the remark was intended to paint Quayle as a man of the people and his rival as a privileged elitist, it was disingenuous to say the least: both men sprang from well-known, well- heeled and politically active families. On his father's side, Quayle's family ran the Chicago Dowel Co., which produced Lincoln Logs. The Vice President's maternal grandfather, Eugene C. Pulliam, was a prosperous conservative publisher of newspapers in Arizona and Indiana. Gore's father, Al Gore Sr., is a former U.S. Senator from Tennessee whose opposition to the war in Vietnam helped defeat him in 1970. While growing up in Washington, Al Jr. lived in the Fairfax Hotel and attended the exclusive St. Albans School before going off to Harvard as an undergraduate.
If Quayle's just-folks barbs at Gore's background seem somewhat off the mark, so do his claims that he served his country "in uniform" in contrast to the Democratic standard bearer. The fact is that of all the three baby- boomer candidates running this year, only Gore saw duty in Vietnam -- albeit as a noncombatant Army reporter with the 20th Engineering Battalion outside Saigon. Quayle avoided the draft and Vietnam by using his family connections to help him gain admittance to the Indiana National Guard -- a solution that Bill Clinton was considering at about the same time in Arkansas before he found other ways to stay out of the army and the war.
Following their military service, Quayle and Gore followed similar career paths that led them back to school and then to Congress in 1976. In the House, Quayle was as well known for his golf as for his legislative abilities, although he did push through such measures as an amendment stipulating that American hostages in Iran would not be required to pay federal income taxes. In the Senate, his most notable achievement was a major job-training bill in 1982. He began to develop a significant conservative following by supporting such projects as the balanced-budget amendment and defense-spending increases. He occasionally positioned himself to the right of even the Reagan Administration, particularly where arms-control treaties were concerned.