Quayle Spends Day in Virginia Enclave of GOP

CHARLES CITY, Va. —  All day Sunday, reporters asked aides to Dan Quayle why the Republican vice presidential nominee was being banished to a Thanksgiving festival on a remote Virginia plantation on the penultimate day of the 1988 campaign.

The reason soon became clear.

Talking without notes in his only speech of the day, Quayle delivered an oral meditation on the nature of Thanksgiving. It began like this:

“I suppose three important things certainly come to my mind that we want to say thank you. The first would be our family. Your family, my family--which is composed of an immediate family of a wife and three children, a larger family with grandparents and aunts and uncles. We all have our family, whichever that may be.”

Nucleus of Civilization

Quayle went on to celebrate family as something “which goes back to the nucleus of civilization. And the very beginnings of civilization, the very beginnings of this country, goes back to the family.

“And time and time again,” he continued, “I’m often reminded, especially in this presidential campaign, of the importance of a family, and what a family means to this country. And so when you pay thanks I suppose the first thing that would come to mind would be to thank the Lord for the family.”

Quayle also gave thanks for the freedom “to elect the representatives to represent them in a free representative democracy.” And he wanted to “thank you for the opportunities, and to thank you for the future, and to thank you for the past of what he has given us.”

Unscripted Remarks

This was the unscripted Quayle, rambling in a way advisers had feared when they decided last weekend to cut back his campaign schedule as the campaign entered the home stretch. A heavy schedule would have raised the risk that Quayle might make an embarrassing mistake, they said. And the campaign wanted voters’ last memory to be Vice President George Bush, not Dan Quayle.

Thus while the other three candidates politicked at breakneck speed in battleground states Sunday, Quayle stayed in Virginia, where polls showed Republicans running 31 points ahead. He went to church, then presented prizes at the festival to fourth-grade winners of a Thanksgiving essay contest and offered his own contribution. The response from the crowd of 400, mostly families, was restrained.

Because the event was billed as nonpartisan, Quayle could not resort to his ready stock of one-liners hailing Bush and savaging Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis. He told speech writer Ken Khachigian: “I’ll just talk.”

‘Winging It’

“He was winging it,” Khachigian said later. “But the thoughts were there.”

Another aide, Bush spokesman Mark Goodin, had joined Quayle on the campaign trail to tell reporters that the idea that Quayle was being “hidden” by the Bush campaign was a “phony baloney argument.

“We can afford to go where we need to go or where we want to go,” Goodin said. The Democrats, he said, had to campaign all over the map in the final days of the campaign while the Republicans needed only to fight a “two-front war” targeted on the Midwest and the West.

But he conceded that while a tired Bush was being asked to campaign on both those fronts, no one in the campaign had proposed that Quayle be asked to help out.

“The public is focused on the top of the ticket,” Goodin argued. He said Quayle had come to the Thanksgiving festival to “shore up” the strongly Republican state and because “we got an invitation from a senior U.S. senator,” Virginia’s John W. Warner.

Rejected Suggestion

Quayle himself strongly rejected the suggestion that the Bush campaign had sent him to Virginia because it did not value his contribution.

“We’re very versatile, very flexible,” he told reporters. “We go to good ones (GOP strongholds), bad ones (Democratic strongholds), in between . . . wherever they say.” Quayle noted that he would return today to Democratic-leaning Maryland, and said he was not offended by his one-stop campaign day.

“What a tremendous way to spend the last Sunday before the election,” he said in his speech.