Students’ ‘Spontaneity’ Puts Quayle on the Defensive

ARNOLD, Mo. — From a young student in the Fox Senior High School Auditorium on Monday came a startling question for Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle: If your wife Marilyn were raped and became pregnant, would you want her to get an abortion?

As other students inexplicably cheered, Quayle pursed his lips, looking not so much surprised as deliberate.

“If that situation happened, it would be tragic,” said Quayle, who a few minutes earlier had said he “always” opposed abortion.

“It would be tough not only on Marilyn, it’d be tough on me and tough on our children. If that happened, I would think that she would and I would hope that she would have--as tough as it may be--would have the child.”

Asks About Vietnam Service

Moments before, another student stepped forward to resurrect the question that haunted the early weeks of Quayle’s candidacy: If you could do it over, would you serve in Vietnam?

“If I had to do it all over again, I’d do the same thing,” said Quayle, a political hawk who has been criticized for joining the National Guard rather than serving in Vietnam.

In Quayle’s vice presidential campaign of self-described “controlled spontaneity,” frequent visits to high schools have come to represent oases of political certainty, where the candidate almost always is greeted by cheers.

On Monday, however, students at Fox Senior High here punctured the rah-rah atmosphere with unscripted spontaneity as they stepped forward in a planned question-and-answer session with Quayle.

If those questions and others unnerved Quayle, it did not show. But they did put him slightly on the defensive on a day when he clearly meant to be on the move against the Democratic ticket.

Quayle chose the school forum to accuse his Democratic opponents of engineering a “massive campaign of disinformation” against the GOP standard-bearers, and said Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis should not “run shamefully away” from longstanding positions on crime and defense.

Assails Charges of Racism

Escalating his attacks in the closing two weeks before the election, Quayle also described as “totally absurd” Democratic assertions that the highly effective assaults by George Bush’s campaign on Dukakis’ past support of a prison furlough program were motivated by racism.

“I think it shows just how desperate they really are, fanning the flames of racism in this country,” Quayle told reporters traveling here on his campaign plane. He made similar remarks in appearances throughout the day.

The most prominent prison furlough case cited by Bush and Quayle is that of Willie Horton, a convicted Massachusetts murderer who was on furlough when he raped a Maryland woman and assaulted her fiance. Horton is black and his victims are white.

Quayle said he was “shocked” at the Democratic allegations and denied there was any subliminal racist message.

The senator’s charges of “disinformation” came as the Democrats launched TV ads charging that the Bush campaign had lied about positions taken by Dukakis. This weekend, the governor, his running mate, Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, and other Democrats accused the Republican campaign of relying on lies to build their lead in the polls.

Appearing at the high school as he set off on several stops in Missouri and Kentucky--both tossup states this political year--Quayle dominated his speech with comparisons between past and present Dukakis statements and said the governor had changed his positions when pressed by “political ambition.”

Cites Defense, Crime

The vice presidential nominee suggested that Dukakis had become more hawkish on defense and crime as the election approached.

“Mr. Dukakis deserves a gold medal for political gymnastics,” Quayle told students here.

He also defended Republican advertisements, including the Horton ad, as legitimate.

“People are very concerned about crime in this country and they (Massachusetts) had the most liberal policy in the country and that was the point,” he told reporters.

He insisted, as Bush has, that the ads and verbal barrages the Republicans have been firing at Dukakis were not “negative” but were instead “factual statements.”

“Show me one statement that’s not factually correct,” Quayle said. “ . . . No one can say that those ads are anything but factual.”

Questions Tone of Campaign

Quayle’s anti-Dukakis comments drew a rejoinder from one Fox Senior High student, who told Quayle during the question-and-answer session that she found the tone of the GOP campaign distressing.

“Digs and mudslinging are totally inappropriate to your campaign,” said the student, who was roundly booed by her classmates.

Quayle appeared momentarily taken aback.

“I’ve talked about education, talked about drugs, talked about jobs, talked about national defense,” he responded. “These are all very, very important issues.

“We want to keep it as an issue-oriented campaign.”