Even though he cannot spell "potato," Dan Quayle is a force to be reckoned with, an idea whose time has come, an underrated ideological powerhouse, and a master tactician: such were the messages that spewed from major news media in the first half of 1992, and they represented a striking departure. In the early days of the current administration, our doe-eyed, gaffe-plagued ("What a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind . . .") vice-president was either ignored or ridiculed by powerful organs of information. He mainly made news when he spoke dazedly of there being oxygen and water on Mars, or said the Holocaust happened in the United States. News organizations once belittled Quayle's competency and intellect with such virulence that Marilyn Quayle told The Washington Post the journalists pursuing her husband seemed "kind of like germs rolling [out from] under a lid." By last spring, however, many of those same reporters and news organs were reporting that the vice-president was, in point of fact, a man on the rise -- indeed, one of the Top Guns of American politics.

Many factors contributed to this astonishing remake of Quayle, but the vice-president probably owed more to Bob Woodward and David Broder than to anybody else. Those two exceedingly influential journalists rose to an oft-issued challenge from the veep's public relations staff and Took Quayle Seriously. They did so at striking length, in a series of articles that ran in The Washington Post last January. Brushing aside criticisms that the series was far too gentle on Quayle, the authors have reissued it, with few if any changes, as a full-length book. "Our impressions of Dan Quayle stem mainly from jokes, cartoons, and the kinds of stories that often distort our pictures of the very powerful," reads the dust jacket. "But behind this image, he has become a skillful political player, a man who has been repeatedly underestimated." Woodward and Broder conclude, among other things, that Quayle: skillfully campaigned to raise his chances of being selected as Republican nominee George Bush's White House inner circle; and effectively scaled back environmental controls as head of the Council on Competitiveness.

The impact of Woodward and Broder's image-doctoring on other journalists is difficult to measure precisely, but was considerable. The winds had been blowing toward more favorable news treatment of Quayle even before their series materialized (see "Dan Quayle, The Sequel," CJR, September/ October 1991). But Woodward and Broder quickened that trend, and, like a balloon filling with helium, Quayle's flaccid image grew firm. Before long, the vice-president had slipped the surly bonds of press ridicule and was soaring above the firmament, hoping to touch the face of greatness. In the weeks after the Woodward-Broder articles first appeared, many more reporters began treating Quayle as a major figure, quoting his utterances with new respect (QUAYLE LEADS ATTACK UPON BUCHANAN, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, February 29; QUAYLE CRITICIZES NEW YORK AS PROOF OF WELFARE'S ILLS, New York Times, February 28; etc.) and writing profiles concluding that he had achieved new stature. Many of these pieces quoted Woodward and Broder's earlier work as evidence that the vice-president indeed deserved sober attention. (See, for instance, Reuters, June 17, DAN QUAYLE, LONG DERIDED, TURNS INTO CAMPAIGN HEAVYWEIGHT.)

By last May, Quayle was being taken seriously enough by the press that his speech attacking the Murphy Brown show -- for supposedly glorifying unwed motherhood -- actually launched a national debate of sorts, and in the next month Quayle's name made the headline in nearly 500 articles in major newspapers. Not all the post-Murphy Brown citations were favorable, to be sure, but they did indicate Quayle was controlling the issues in a way that would have been impossible if he were still being dismissed as a national joke.

But, as Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz recently pointed out, there is a law that operates as inexorably in political reporting as it does in physics: what goes up must come down. In June, the ascendant Quayle developed a slow leak after he instructed a pupil in a school spelling bee to spell potato with a "e," provoking a vigorous jab of media ridicule. Just as he appeared to be patching up that hole, Quayle suffered other punctures. He provoked a new round of bad press after appearing to reverse his staunch anti-abortion stance, saying on Larry King Live that he would support his daughter if she opted to have an abortion. Meanwhile, with Ross Perot out of the race and Bill Clinton surging far ahead of Bush in the polls, a good many top Republicans began leaking to news organizations their belief that Quayle should be cut loose from the ticket.

At the time CJR was going to press, Bush was still standing by his Dan.

Not so the press pack. "Dan Quayle is a drag on Bush," reported Richard Morin, The Washington Post's director of polling (July 26), citing survey data suggesting that Quayle could cost Bush a close election. The New York Times ran stories (e.g., July 23, 25, both page 1) suggesting the veep's political position was very weak indeed. Just three weeks earlier, the Times had declared in a July 5 Sunday magazine cover article that "Quayle's Moment" was at hand. That piece, which acknowledged the surge the vice-president aides thought that he got as a result of the Washington Post's Quayle series, was one of the most prominent by-products of Woodward and Broder's helium factory.

Of course, even before the Quayle balloon began to sag, critics had been taking Woodward and Broder to task for what they perceived as a soft reporting job that inflated Quayle's strengths while underplaying his weaknesses. Some detractors went so far as to suggest that an underlying motivation for the project was to curry favor and open channels of access to someone who could become an accidental president at any moment. Critics also pointed out that Woodward and Broder ignore some embarrassing Quayle episodes. Fore instance, while reporting that Marilyn Quayle has a great deal of influence on her husband, the authors make no mention of her adherence, or one-time adherence, to the teachings of Robert Thieme, Jr., a controversial Houston minister who has reportedly preached that the United Nations, among other organizations, is in league with Satan. (Such details would seem to be relevant. Consider the recent press focus on how Hillary Clinton's legal philosophy and liberal views could be influencing her husband.)

Although The Man Who Would Be President does include a good deal of unflattering material about Quayle, many readers are likely to come away with a generally favorable picture of him -- the book stretches to achieve this effect, at least on the surface. Most of the favorable quotations come not from detached independent observers but from friends and allies, including his wife, who at one point proudly declares, "He makes things happen." (In fairness, the book also suggests a darker side of the Marilyn-Dan relationship. It describes her ordering an aide to remove a photograph of Quayle from his office wall, objecting that it made him look fat, then obliterating his image with a felt pen and kicking the framed picture across the floor.) The book does not skimp with observations about what a decent guy Quayle really is. And it even strives to justify Quayle's much-derided golf fixation -- in an overwrought section about how golf is supposedly "key to understanding the vice-president," how his tenacity and competitive drive in the political world are tied, in some mystical, Zen-like way, to his perfectionism on the links: "'After an evening appearance that did not go as well as he wanted . . .,' one aide said, 'I have seen him, in the dark of night, jump out of his car and walk right to the putting green and start putting. The imposition of discipline. Or absolute order. What matters. And that's not just relaxation. That's his version of Oriental shadow-boxing.'" Quayle's p.r. staff must have been particularly pleased with this passage.

In promotional appearances, Woodward and Broder have been, while not uncritical of the vice-president, certainly more charitable and chummy toward him than one might have expected two supposedly tough reporters to be. Consider these excerpts from CNN's May 7 Larry King Live:

Broder: We traveled with him everywhere that he went. We got to be virtual insiders on his staff. . . .

Woodward: . . . David and I found a basic midwestern decency. This guy does not have the demons running around his head or his heart that, say, a Richard Nixon did or a Lyndon Johnson did.

Larry King: In other words, he doesn't hate?

Woodward: He does not hate. He does not hate . . .

King: Would you say his word is good?

Broder: Yes, I think it is . . .

All very heartwarming.

But when you cut to the essentials, what are Broder and Woodward really saying about Quayle? According to political scientist William Schneider, all they are saying is that Quayle is "not a drooling numskull." By this reading, Quayle not only can feed himself unaided and speak when spoken to but he actually possesses real political skills, and news coverage of him should consequently go beyond ridicule. Fair enough.

But if this is the authors' point, did it really have to be made in a massive, seven-part series? Wouldn't one forty-inch article have sufficed? And did it really require the joint efforts of two of the profession's most high-powered reporters? Because Woodward and Broder devoted such effort to the project, other journalists reacted by taking Quayle a bit too seriously, overcompensating for their earlier scorn. Yes, Quayle's efforts to undercut environmental regulations with his Council on Competitiveness have been effective (as Democrats admit) and deserve to be reported. And when a vice-president says controversial things, they, too should be covered. But American news organizations do not seem to able to do anything in moderation, and last summer's spate of Quayle-has-arrived stories is a case in point.

They seem especially excessive when you consider that there is another possible interpretation of Woodward and Broder's work. Could this normally humorless pair actually be offering us a subtle form of satire? That would certainly put the above-quoted golf sequence in a different light. And in many other sections, their presentation can be interpreted as a spoof of a behine-the-scenes political profile, a send-up of Quayle's true qualifications.

Take the authors' great emphasis on just how "in-depth" their reporting was. They restate several times that the job took six months and entailed more than two hundred interviews, including twenty with Quayle himself. Yet, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there isn't much there there in the final product. This material really had to be stretched to make it book-length, with the help of lots of pictures and some very wide margins. Anyone with normal reading speed can breeze through the book in an hour or so; one comes away, after finishing it, with no sense whatsoever of any inner depths of Dan Quayle.

Are Woodward and Broder going to such elaborate lengths simply to underscore just how shallow the vice-president really is -- to provide what amounts to a wry "three dimensional" portrait of a figure whose third dimension is often hard to discern? There is, in fact, material in the book that can be construed to support such an interpretation: tucked between sections on Quayle's purported attributes are quotations from aides and observers raising doubts about his analytical gifts and concerns about his heavy dependency on wife and staff; observations that Quayle seems to have drawn no cogent lessons from the major conflicts of his formative years -- civil rights, Vietnam, and Watergate. There are direct quotations that may suggest little is lurking behind that callow forehead. For instance, when asked to summarize major themes from Paul Johnson's Modern Times, a book he said had been very meaningful to him, the veep is depicted babbling helplessly ("It is a very good historical book about history," etc.). The authors suggest that Quayle might have a reading deficiency (which would help explain "potatoe").

Whether Woodward and Broder intend the book as a serious, balanced presentation or as a more sardonic work, it is rather embarrassing that the end product goaded other journalists into treating Dan Quayle as a full-fledged political heavyweight. The fact that it did suggests that we in the news business might have a reading deficiency of our own.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE PRESIDENT: DAN QUAYLE BY BOB WOODWARD AND DAVID BRODER SIMON & SCHUSTER. 207 PP. $ 18

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