WASHINGTON -- Former Vice President Dan Quayle abruptly abandoned his bid for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination yesterday, citing family concerns.
Mr. Quayle's decision, which he said he made late Wednesday, took fellow Republicans by surprise. Since being treated for a variety of health problems in recent months, he had been campaigning around the country and planned to formally enter the race in April.
"We were convinced that a winning campaign could have been accomplished and the necessary funds could have been raised," Mr. Quayle, 48, said in a four-paragraph statement. But he said he and his wife, Marilyn, decided to "put our family first" and to forgo "the disruption to our lives that a third straight national campaign would create."
GOP politicians said Mr. Quayle faced an uphill challenge, both politically and financially, had he decided to enter the race. And several cited Indiana Sen. Richard G. Lugar's recent decision to go after the nomination as an important factor.
Mr. Lugar was considered the state's leading national figure and a serious presidential prospect until an August day in 1988 when George Bush stunned the nation by selecting Mr. Quayle, an obscure second-term senator, as his running mate.
According to a well-placed GOP veteran, who spoke on the condition he not be identified, Mr. Quayle was recently told by a number of prominent Indiana Republicans that they were putting their money and support behind Mr. Lugar.
"Quayle did not move quickly enough to lock up that Indiana state money," Mark Goodin, a top Quayle political adviser, acknowledged in a television interview.
Mr. Quayle's decision was widely seen as good news for the presidential chances of Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, who, at least for the moment, becomes the leading "unblemished conservative" in the race, as one veteran Republican politician put it.
"Now, there is no doubt that I am the conservative in the race," Mr. Gramm told the Associated Press.
Mr. Quayle is the fourth potential Republican contender to opt out of the nomination contest. Last week, former Housing Secretary Jack F. Kemp announced that he would not run, on the heels of no-go decisions by former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and former Education Secretary William J. Bennett.
A key element in their decisions has been the fund-raising burden of the '96 race. The conventional view is that, to win the nomination, a candidate must raise as much as $25 million by Dec. 31 because, under a new, more compressed primary schedule, 23 states will choose delegates in a 35-day period next winter.
Despite shrinkage in the GOP field, there are indications that other candidates could join. Mr. Kemp said yesterday that he would be surprised if "several governors" did not enter.
"I think the race will be bigger than it is right now," he said. Among those frequently mentioned are California Gov. Pete Wilson and Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld, who said yesterday that he would decide in a few months.
Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas is regarded as the front-runner at this early stage. But Mr. Gramm and Mr. Quayle had been considered the favorites of the party's conservative wing and of religious conservatives, whom the former vice president has long courted.
There is now "a huge hole" in the GOP field, said Ralph Reed Jr., executive director of the Christian Coalition, which is organizing its members into what they hope will be a major force in the nomination contest.
"The ball of family values is now in the air, and whoever takes it to the hoop is going to be the next president," Mr. Reed said.
He estimated that Mr. Quayle had the support of up to 30 percent of religious conservatives and said his withdrawal could become "a booster rocket" for Mr. Gramm.
Others questioned whether a Quayle candidacy ever had broad backing. They said the former vice president had discovered in his recent forays that he had more good will in the party than actual support.
"I think what happened is, he really got off to a late start, both politically and in terms of fund raising," said Tom Pauken, the Texas Republican Party chairman, who said he spoke with Mr. Quayle last week. "People who he thought would be with him if he ran weren't."
Mr. Pauken added that "movement conservatives haven't gotten behind anybody as of yet" and that the race is "still wide-open."
The Texas chairman was in Washington yesterday to address the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, where Mr. Quayle is to be the main speaker at the closing banquet tomorrow night.
Former Education Secretary Lamar Alexander, who, for the moment, becomes the leading candidate from outside Washington in the Republican field, said he was surprised by the Quayle decision.
"All of this boils down to whether inside of you, you have a reason to run and you want to run," he said. "And I thought Dan had that. I hope his health is all right. It may have been the financial challenge was more than he wanted to undertake."
Mr. Quayle was hospitalized in November for treatment of a blood clot on his lung and in January had his appendix removed after a tumor was discovered. The tumor was benign, according to Quayle spokesmen, and he returned to the political wars last month, saying: "I'm scanned, I'm tested and I'm ready" for the '96 contest.
Preference polls of Republican voters, which at this stage tend to reflect little more than how well-known a candidate is, showed Mr. Quayle a distant second to Mr. Dole. A Gallup poll conducted last week for CNN indicated that, even among Republicans, Mr. Quayle still engenders negative feelings; fully half of Republicans questioned said they have an unfavorable opinion of him.
Mr. Quayle never was able to recover politically from the disastrous publicity he received during the 1988 campaign and his subsequent years as vice president. A book tour last year to promote his memoirs failed to undo an image -- unfair in the view of most who know him -- of Mr. Quayle as a dim bulb.
Even after he left office and the national spotlight, he remained the butt of late-night TV jokes. Just last Friday, during a visit by Mr. Dole to the CBS "Late Show," David Letterman flashed a mock campaign button of himself and Mr. Quayle, emblazoned with the title of the hit movie "Dumb and Dumber."
"I still have a stereotype that was formed in the first three weeks of that 1988 campaign, where the media just became unhinged," Mr. Quayle told the Des Moines Register Monday in a campaign trip to Iowa.
In that interview, three days before his decision to quit the race, he said he planned to devote "plenty of time . . . to the sort of one-on-one campaigning necessary to win" the Iowa caucuses next winter.
"For me, retail politics is something I enjoy," he said. "It's the way I did it in Indiana."