For Quayle, the Road to the White House Hits a Detour : Politics: Some say that Bush’s fall may be fatal to the Indianan’s ambitions. Even his aides admit he must regroup and remake his political persona.

INDIANAPOLIS —  George Bush gaveth, and he tooketh away.

So it may be with the presidential hopes that have glimmered for Dan Quayle ever since Bush picked the then-obscure senator from Indiana as his running mate in 1988. With Tuesday’s defeat of the Republican ticket, those dreams may have been snuffed out forever. At the least, Quayle’s journey to the White House became a lot longer.

If Bush had won reelection, the vice president would have approached the 1996 election as a front-runner for the GOP nomination, backed by a solid-gold network of allies and an eight-year incumbency in a party that attaches great importance to high rank.

Instead, he’s “been tainted by his association with Bush, and may not recover,” said Burton Yale Pines, a conservative activist with the Washington-based Center for Public Policy Studies think tank.

And, referring to the ridicule Quayle has endured over whether he measured up to the demands of national office, Pines said, “Think of it: He gave up a safe seat in the Senate, and took a beating for four years. Dan Quayle has lived a Greek tragedy.”

Quayle advisers and friends dispute that Bush’s fall may be fatal to the Indianan’s ambitions. But some acknowledge he needs to regroup and perhaps undergo reconstructive surgery on his political persona. The major challenge involves overcoming his image as a none-too-bright bumbler that has kept his negative ratings among the general public stubbornly high.

Still, even as Quayle’s war with “Murphy Brown” and his misspelling of “potato” made him the butt of jokes, they also gave him a renown that is rare among vice presidents. His condemnation of his critics as members of a “cultural elite” who are out of touch with mainstream America struck a chord among conservatives and is likely to continue to make him a top drawer among them.

Quayle, 45, won’t discuss how he reads his political prospects. He laughed off questions Thursday about whether he will run for President in 1996, saying only: “I want to stay active. I want to continue to make a difference. There’s a lot of options out there, believe me.”

Winning another public office as a stepping stone to the White House may not be one of them. His friend, Republican Dan Coats, won reelection to one of Indiana’s U.S. Senate seats Tuesday. The state’s other Senate seat is up for election in 1994, but its longtime occupant, Republican Richard G. Lugar, has given no indiction he plans to give it up. And reelected Tuesday to a four-year term as Indiana’s governor was Evan Bayh, son of the man Quayle whipped in 1980 to get to the Senate.

Mitch Daniels, a longtime Quayle associate and former White House political director, believes the vice president should bolster his image for leadership with a tour of duty outside politics, perhaps in the corporate world.

“It’s hard to come off this four years and this election and move in a straight line,” Daniels said. “I think he ought to take a lot of time and reflect on it.”

Analysts and people around him point to a variety of things Quayle could do in the next four years to keep his name in front of the electorate. They say he could take a job with a law firm or work at his family’s Central Newspapers chain and still have time to stump for conservative causes, take part in fund-raisers and perhaps write a syndicated column.

Regardless, some of Quayle’s supporters are clearly thinking ahead to 1996. On Election Day, this sign bobbed above the crowd at a Quayle appearance: “Really annoy the media: Quayle-Limbaugh ’96.”

Several of those close to Quayle say, with varying degrees of directness, that they expect him to seek the presidency (although it is doubtful a ticket he headed would include conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh).

Marilyn Quayle, considered by some the flame under her husband’s ambition, told an interviewer last month that she believes he is so good at “solving problems,” he should run for the White House.

Jeffrey Nesbit, Quayle’s communications director, says he “can’t believe he wouldn’t run.”

And aides point to history to argue that being on a losing ticket is not fatal to presidential ambitions. Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale rose from the ashes of the Democratic ticket’s immolation in 1980 to win his party’s presidential nomination four years later--although what it got him was landslide defeat.

Political analysts agree that if Quayle wants the top job, he will have to work on a variety of tasks.

They include distancing himself from his boss and establishing a strong independent identity from a field of conservative rivals that includes Patrick J. Buchanan, Housing Secretary Jack Kemp, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas and former Education Secretary William J. Bennett.

Even before Election Day, Quayle staff members had begun trying to steer clear of what they viewed as a misguided Bush campaign. Aides have been hinting, ever more broadly, that their camp has all along had a different agenda than Bush’s, and would have run a far different campaign. For instance, they would have pushed hard for supply-side solutions to economic ills and charted a crusading conservative agenda to address America’s social problems.

The aides fault the White House’s campaign tactics as well. They say Bush should have followed through on his various campaign themes, should have focused his message sooner and should never have stooped to calling Democrats Bill Clinton and Al Gore “bozos” and “crazies.”

Quayle himself on Thursday said Bush might have been able to win reelection with a better, bolder campaign in the face of the country’s economic difficulties.

“The economy is not as bad as we’ve been told, and we were unable to push through that perception,” Quayle said. “That takes a strategy and being willing to take on the odds.”

For their part, Bush aides have not been supine in the blame game, and it remains to be seen whether Quayle will fully escape responsibility for the GOP loss.

Even before the election, one Republican campaign aide said Quayle might cost the Republicans 5% of the popular vote. Although that remains hard to quantify, the Los Angeles Times exit polling of voters found that among those who said their opinion of Quayle influenced their decision, fully 63% voted for Clinton and 13% for independent Ross Perot; only 24% stuck with the GOP ticket.

Analysts of various political stripes agree that, love him or hate him, Quayle forced the world to take him seriously as vice president.

He led the White House Council on Competitiveness, which conservatives saw as a champion of deregulation and liberals viewed as a threat to Washington’s regulatory apparatus. As head of the Space Council, he helped maintain funding for NASA programs that were under attack as overpriced and of limited value.

With a talented staff, he developed and road-tested campaign themes. He emerged as a particularly vocal advocate of “family values” and legal reform. These are among the issues that could help him rally conservatives to his side in the future, analysts say.