Too much Mr. Nice Guy

Lasalle LASALLE, the black man who says that it was a speech by George Bush 11 years ago which changed his life and kept him from turning out onto the streets of Los Angeles with the rioters, may be the only person ever for whom a speech by George Bush inspired any thought more stirring than a murmured affirmation that the speaker "seems like a nice man." He is a nice man, no doubt about it. Far too nice. Fortunately, there are signs that his Vice President is becoming less nice.

Dan Quayle's unkind words about Murphy Brown provoked an eruption of anger and resentment on the Left that does the heart good. I only wish I could believe that Quayle had done it, as his critics allege, from cynical political calculation and not out of Bush-like sincerity. His thoughts on "values" probably come, as his speech-writers insist, "all from the guy."

Still, there is the cheering thought that Quayle has the power, in Russell Baker's phrase, "to cloud men's minds." Baker is referring, in particular, to the minds of liberal Democrats, who, rather than pass up an opportunity to heap scorn on the Vice President's head, have recently found themselves appearing to attack love, marriage, and intact families. Quayle's advocacy of such things shows, according to Hillary Clinton, that he is "out of touch" with "real problems and real people."

Such mind-clouding is even more apparent in Time magazine, which marshalled not one, not two, not three, but four of its heavy hitters to insist in four different ways that what Quayle said about family values was perfectly correct, but that it was perfectly scandalous of him to have said it.

Russell Baker's own column is a good example of the curious phenomenon it is meant to call our attention to, since he can't allow himself to say that the speech was "unexceptionable" without also saying: 1) that it is scary that our leaders spend their evenings watching sitcoms (Quayle himself did not see the Murphy Brown show that he criticized), 2) that Quayle is "the essential residue of media politics" because he is good-looking, and 3) that the speech was a "fairly obvious attempt by Republicans to play the old race card"--all just in case anyone should suppose that such a clever man as he is might take Dan Quayle seriously.

This blind contempt for Quayle on the part of his enemies is really a great strength and one which I hope he can learn to take advantage of. If Quayle has the startled look of a deer caught in the headlights, the frantic scurryings of his liberal critics are like those of cockroaches when the kitchen light is switched on. They know that Quayle is exposing the extent of their own depredations against the social fabric and just hate the fact that most Americans will agree with him.

Unfortunately, what should have been an unalloyed triumph for conservatives was spoiled by presidential niceness. Although Bush had said many of the same things as Quayle in his commencement speech at Notre Dame the week before, he could not allow himself to seem too much in agreement with his own Vice President. It turns out that Quayle has the power to cloud the minds of his allies as well as those of his enemies.

Who got to Marlin Fitzwater between his first statement of support for Quayle and his backtracking before the morning was over? One theory, whispered about in the Quayle camp, holds that it was neither of the usual suspects, Sam Skinner nor Bob Teeter, but a highly placed Administration woman--perhaps Mary Matalin, the deputy campaign manager for political operations, or Torie Clarke, the campaign press secretary--who put it to him that somehow an attack on Murphy Brown was insulting to women.

This interpretation of the Administration's disarray is supported by John E. Yang and Ann Devroy in the Washington Post, who quoted "Administration women" as being "steamed":

"Does the Vice President know that the

President's daughter is a single mother?"

asked one GOP woman.... Said another,

"How dare he suggest that all these

women struggling to raise children can't

do it without a man?" Quayle's own clarification the same day--"I have the greatest respect for single mothers. They are true heroes"--seemed designed to turn down the temperature on some of those "steamed" women without actually recanting. Yet to Fitzwater's attempt to make the fictional Miss Brown more acceptable as the embodiment of "pro-life values," Quayle shot back: "That is not correct. Murphy Brown, the show, does not represent pro-life policies. . . . Probably the only reason they chose to have a child rather than an abortion was because they knew the ratings would go up higher having the child."

Naturally there was an attempt to make light of these internal tensions. Fitzwater jocularly offered to marry either Murphy Brown or Candice Bergen, the actress who plays her, and said that the story was "maybe even as big as broccoli." Everything was meant to have been neatly resolved in the President's formula that "children should have the benefit of being born into families with a mother and a father."