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player ready...America paused last week to contemplate the great thoughts of Midwestern man, courtesy of Indiana’s own Dan Quayle.
Judging from the breathless reportage, the former vice president’s return to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club Thursday to reprise his “Murphy Brown” speech was a watershed political event.
CNN, the increasingly goofy all-news cable channel, aired the oratory live, and ABC’s Ted Koppel validated the Hoosier public relations coup later on “Nightline.”
As he’s done before, Quayle came out foursquare for family values.
Indeed, the speech by which Quayle sought to get his political comeback airborne came from the same podium where in 1992 he chastised the CBS sitcom.
At that time, the vice president told his audience: “It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown . . . mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child out of wedlock and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”
The remarks fueled some controversy, as actress Candice Bergen correctly pointed out that “Murphy Brown” was a television program. You know, made up.
For a 47-year-old career politician, however, the CBS plot line apparently provided a shining moment and an issue to ride.
So Quayle was back on the case last week, contending that “the single most critical threat” to society is “the dissolution of the family . . . “
Fair enough, Dan. Nobody thought it was the designated-hitter rule or the metric system that was the source of all our travails.
But what’s required, even from a man who, in Jesse Jackson’s perfect phrase, has enjoyed “a life of lifts and gifts,” is a little follow-up.
None was evident in the San Francisco address.
Explaining the social pathology has become a full-time job for itinerant GOP ideologues like Quayle and former Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett. But Quayle’s president, George Bush, and his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, shared the ex-veep’s rhetorical approach to the dilemma.
Like Bush and Reagan, the extent of Quayle’s thinking about “family values” is the continual repetition of that crowd-pleasing phrase.
The sticking point for the “family values” crowd comes when they’re asked what they might do if somebody put them behind the wheel of government?
Another question that arises from Quayle’s “clarion call,” in USA Today’s deft phrase, is the following: Where is the anti-family lobby? Where are the folks who argue that the collapse of the family is a darn good thing, and we ought to have more of it?
Just about every politician with a blue suit supports the idea of welfare reform. So who is arguing that children ought to keep having children, or that child-support deadbeats ought to be left alone?
Bill Clinton made welfare reform a centerpiece of his election campaign, promising, perhaps vaingloriously, to “end welfare as we know it.”
His plan will go to Capitol Hill early next year at the start of the new Congress.
And the lone obstacle is likely to be a decision on whether folks on the welfare rolls get one year or two years of cash assistance before being dropped.
Democrats wish they had a bill to run on this November, and Republicans can’t wait to see Clinton’s plan so they can make speeches and toughen it up.
Beyond welfare reform lies nothing but the hollow rhetoric and wishful thinking of the sort exemplified by Quayle. All of this, of course, has little or nothing to do with the dissolution of the family.
Dan Quayle went to San Francisco with a speech written by somebody else and the sense he might get himself back into the game in 1996.
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If Quayle runs in two years, it’s only because the chaps in Washington doing the thinking for him believe Clinton is so weakened he cannot survive.
And what Quayle’s brain trust understands is that “family values” is a perfect issue for their man.
Unlike health care or tax equity or reducing the size of government, a family-values campaign requires nothing more than a boundless collection of platitides and a few anecdotes about abuse of the welfare system.
Quayle’s speech Thursday might have been about the life and death of Robert Sandifer, the 11-year-old Chicago youth who, according to police, lived as a felon and died at the hands of his fellow gang members.
But the dreadful saga of Robert Sandifer is too real, too intractable for the family-values set. Better to spend time and energy implying that the dissolution of the family is somehow Clinton’s responsibility.
Better to advance the notion that a do-nothing vice president in a do-nothing presidency would make it right if he could just get back in power.
Maybe that will be enough to get Dan Quayle out of Indiana. But, maybe, just maybe, voters will demand something more than the scripted restatement of the obvious.