COLUMN RIGHT : Once in Office, the Presidential Aura Appears : Quayle might not be electable, but if circumstance put him in power, he’d get the job done.

With President Bush’s collapse in Tokyo, Vice President Quayle is back in the limelight, having receded from it since the President’s heart fibrillation last May. Now as then, many in Washington are wondering if the amiable golfer from Huntington, Ind., is a substantial enough person to carry out the duties of the presidency. We know that he is a genial fellow, but the office seems to call for something more than niceness.

As it happens, this new flurry of concern coincides with a long investigative series about the vice president by David S. Broder and Bob Woodward, of which the Washington Post has so far published four of seven parts. Despite lengthy research and 20 interviews with the vice president, these industrious reporters seem not to have unearthed anything reprehensible (one must assume that they looked for it). The series has been uncommonly flattering, praising Quayle’s political maneuvering, his tact, his good judgment, his wisdom in accepting advice from his wife, and so on. Even before Bush’s illness, then, we were seeing in Washington courtly obeisance toward a man who until recently was mentioned most often by comedians.

Clearly, Quayle has been underrated. Both as a senator on the Armed Services Committee and as vice president he has shown a willingness to master the complex details of military procurement and arms control. More recently, his Council on Competitiveness has grappled with a flood of rules unleashed by the Regulatory President (as the National Journal has dubbed Bush). The unpopularity of the council suggests that it may not have been entirely ineffective.

Quayle is a man of much greater self-confidence than he projects when seated in front of cameras and television lights. He has hired assistants whose intelligence does not intimidate him--another sign of self-assurance, and one that is by no means commonly found in Washington. He has also been blessed by luck. His elevation to the Senate, which involved the defeat of a well-entrenched Democrat, probably wouldn’t have happened if 1980 had not been an unusually good year for Republicans--with another underrated politician heading the ticket and carrying marginal Republicans with him.

At the same time, the impression persists that Quayle lacks the indefinable sense of authority, gravitas, call it what you will, that is expected in a President. Perhaps it is nothing more than his youth, his slight physique, his light blue eyes, his rather weak good looks. It is unfair, no doubt, that a politician should be judged by such criteria. But it cannot be avoided. In this country of 250 million people, we inevitably get to know politicians, to the extent that we do, through the medium of television. Thus filtered, Quayle’s “image” has been persistently unconvincing.

This would probably be enough to ensure his defeat if he were to run for President. But if Bush were to die in office, thereby elevating Quayle, it is more than likely that the immediate trappings of the office and the solemnity of the occasion would envelop the man with the necessary aura. Somehow, the Republic would survive. Something like this did happen when Franklin D. Roosevelt was succeeded by the haberdasher from Missouri, Harry S. Truman. Quayle would perform satisfactorily. His competence is not in doubt. He no doubt belongs to that large class of citizens who would find it difficult to be elected to the presidency, but would have the ability to carry out its duties if they attained it accidentally.

Another person of whom this has been said recently is Britain’s unelected prime minister, John Major. As a mere member of Parliament, his gray bureaucratic demeanor would have been unimpressive on the hustings. But adorned with the trappings of office, he just may pass muster with the electorate later this year.

The worldwide concern about the condition of a man taken ill at a banquet suggests that far too much power is already concentrated in the hands of the President. The Republic has become an empire, and power in the United States, as in other countries, has become far too centralized. For that reason, almost anyone who rises to the Oval Office, whether by election or accident, is likely to seem inadequate to the role. But it is the role itself that should be deflated, not the candidate that should be magnified.

The Soviet collapse and the end of any further need for intercontinental arm-wrestling should help deflate our fears and our expectations of the office. By the same token, a President Quayle, who would probably seem insufficiently heroic for the role, would inadvertently perform a useful service by undermining the mystique of the heroic presidency.