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In the first days after the convention, Quayle was so gung-ho that his cautious advisers often looked like dog walkers being pulled along by an overexcited puppy straining on a leash. Quayle no longer strays from his carefully crafted texts. His exuberant gestures have grown more stately. Privately, Quayle remains irrepressibly boyish. While visiting a NASA installation in Louisiana, he pointed to a gigantic external fuel tank for the shuttle and said, "I can now say I've been around a bigger tank than the one that Michael Dukakis drives." He bounded onto the staff bus and jauntily informed his aides, "I just wanted to show you I could do a joke on my own."
Quayle prefers to speak off the cuff. When he goes before small groups and on topics he knows well, his handlers indulge him. They are a patient lot. Talking to young, mainly Hispanic Job Corps students in Amarillo, Texas, Quayle tried for an inspirational touch and came off like a LifeSpring instructor. "Don't forget the importance of the family. It begins with the family. We're not going to redefine the family. Everybody knows the definition of the family." He paused meaningfully. "A child." He paused. "A mother." Another pause. "A father." Perhaps realizing that many in his audience came from broken homes, he rushed to conclusion. "There are other arrangements of the family, but that is a family and family values."
Under pressure, Quayle seems to register only two emotions, fear and pleasure. When his boyhood hero Barry Goldwater crabbily turned on him at an Arizona stop and growled, "I want you to go back and tell George Bush to start talking about the issues," Quayle flushed, and a helpless look of panic flashed across his eyes. Finally, with a nervous laugh, Quayle answered, "I wish Barry would just say what's on his mind."
The deer-caught-in-the-headlights look, more than his careless phrases, has marred his encounters with the press. Since reporters, like attack dogs, lunge at the first hint of fear, Quayle's handlers wisely keep him as far as possible from the baying press corps. Quayle "sightings" are so rare that TV crews on his plane call him Elvis. The good-natured Quayle laughed when he was told.
Quayle is likable. He mingled easily in the cushy, cozy club-car politics of Capitol Hill. Even Lloyd Bentsen used to play tennis with him now and again. But affability goes only so far. Although there is no entrance exam for Vice Presidents, Quayle does not demonstrate the expected seriousness of purpose. As he prepares for Wednesday's debate and tries to gain enough stature to avoid remaining a drag on the ticket, time is running out. And perhaps for the first time in his life, all the friends and string pullers in the world cannot help him.
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DESCRIPTION: Percentage of voters more inclined or less inclined to vote for Republican ticket because of Dan Quayle.