Candice Bergen Agrees with Dan Quayle

By Stephen M. Silverman

Thursday July 11, 2002 11:05 AM EDT

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All that righteous indignation for nothing: Candice Bergen, it turns out, actually concurred with Dan Quayle, who 10 years ago, when he was Vice-President, famously criticized her and her TV show, "Murphy Brown," for presenting a leading character as an unwed mother. At the time, Quayle, who was long the butt of jokes for his several grammatical and logical gaffes in public, attacked Bergen's "Murphy Brown" TV character for "mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another 'lifestyle choice.'" Commentators had a field day -- mostly asking whether Quayle had anything better to do -- while on the CBS sitcom itself, Bergen, as Brown, was shown heavily bogged down with the chores of motherhood and asking what Dan Quayle found so glamorous about her situation. But, reports the Associated Press, speaking to TV reporters this week, Bergen, now 56 (and a lifelong liberal, despite having a staunchly conservative father, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen), declared: "I never have really said much about the whole episode, which was endless. But his speech was a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did." Still stinging from the criticism that was leveled against him a decade ago, Quayle, 55, who no longer holds public office, only two months ago praised the moral values of "The Osbournes," despite its profanity, because he said the show presents to American audiences the negative effects of drug use by featuring Ozzy. "That Dan, " Bergen said, "you just can't predict him."