NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE / DAVID M. SHRIBMAN

Hurling stones in Granite State

By David M. Shribman, Globe Staff, June 22, 1999

CONCORD, N.H. -- Dan Quayle served two terms in the US House of Representatives from Indiana. He won two Senate races. He was elected vice president. He represented the nation in 47 different countries, the American flag flapping behind him at airport greeting ceremonies. So why now, here in this state of great green hillsides and fast blue streams, is a man with Establishment credentials railing so against the Establishment?

The answer reveals a lot about Quayle, about New Hampshire, about the modern Republican Party, and about the character of the 2000 presidential race.

Last week Texas Governor George W. Bush barnstormed through the state as if he were Nathaniel Hawthorne's great stone face made flesh: the estimable, enviable, inevitable man, the one the villagers in political hamlets had awaited for years. Even as he transformed the race, he transformed himself, from a figure on the sidelines to a figure on a pedestal.

But as one of the state's leading experts on political behavior, Robert Frost, might say: Something there is in New Hampshire that doesn't love a pedestal.

Bush, to be sure, is bolted on the pedestal relatively securely right now. But when Quayle hurls stones against the statuary, he's playing to a receptive audience that is small but significant.

That audience isn't the vast majority of Republicans here, who resemble the flinty caricature of independence less than at any time since the New Hampshire primary began in 1916. Quayle's audience is religious conservatives, devout tax-cutters, doctrinaire opponents of big government -- the sort of folks who carried the north country for Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Trying to emerge

Quayle's campaign style, more than anyone else's in the race, underscores the strategies that animate the Republican contest in 2000. He is not trying to win the primary in this state, where the candidates resemble the description that 19th-century painter Benjamin Champney gave to the White Mountains: "a combination of the wild and the cultivated, the bold and the graceful." He probably can't win it. He is merely trying to emerge from the granite notches and valleys as the candidate of the conservatives.

That wouldn't mean much except for the peculiar architecture of this race. Republican candidates think of the contest as a split-level house. On one level is the struggle among the Establishment candidates -- Bush, former Red Cross president Elizabeth H. Dole, Senator John McCain of Arizona, former governor Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, probably Representative John R. Kasich of Ohio. On the other is the fight among the conservatives -- Quayle, publisher Steve Forbes, Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire, social activist Gary Bauer, commentator Patrick J. Buchanan.

If the theory of the split-level campaign holds, the contest will be distilled to one Establishment candidate, or maybe two -- and one conservative.

That's why, on a radio show in Manchester the other morning, Quayle, now 52, went out of his way to note that Republicans weaken themselves when they choose the Establishment candidate. His surprising example: 1976, when the GOP nominee was an incumbent president, Gerald R. Ford, rather than an insurgent challenger, Ronald Reagan.

Recalling the insurgency

That very year, Quayle, a boyish candidate for the House, backed Reagan against the president of his own party, who eventually lost to Jimmy Carter. "Everybody said Reagan was too right-wing and too dumb," Quayle said in a conversation in a Concord law office, only later realizing the special sting of that phrase. Then he added: "Every once in a while when I get a bad press I think about what people said about Ronald Reagan. He did just fine."

In 1958, when Quayle lived in Arizona and went to the state fairgrounds with his mother, she wore her AuH20 sash and he handed out pamphlets for Goldwater, who six years later became the godfather to modern conservatism. By that time Quayle was Goldwater chairman in Huntington High School in Indiana. Goldwater won the student straw poll, though he eventually lost Indiana and 43 other states.

So now Quayle -- more gray hair at the temples, more confident on the trail -- is a lonely figure, bounding around New Hampshire, sloshing against the wake of Governor Bush. The outsider's role is particularly difficult for a man who once was a heartbeat from ultimate power -- and now is below the first tier of candidates.

But Quayle's very status as an outsider provides a lesson in modern Republicanism.

For years the Republicans were more a lodge than a party, handing the nomination to the senior figure among them: Richard Nixon, Ford, Reagan, George Bush, Bob Dole. Custom would dictate that the nomination go to the former vice president. Quayle's struggles -- the outsider taking on the anointed -- underscore an important change in the party at the turn of the century.