Ben Quayle Denies Blogging for Racy Website

Aug. 13, 2010 — -- Two controversial political ads and an increasingly messy flap over contributing posts to a racy website have left Ben Quayle, a candidate for Congress who is the son of former Vice President Dan Quayle, with a bit of "potatoe" on his face.

Good-looking, articulate and archly conservative, the young Quayle shares many of his father's best attributes, but he might also share his father's knack for stepping in it -- as the former vice president once did when he famously misspelled "potato" in front of schoolkids.

Quayle, 33, released Wednesday a tough-talking political ad in which he calls President Barack Obama "the worst president in history" and promises to "knock the hell" out of Washington.

"I love Arizona. I was raised right. Somebody has to go to Washington and knock the hell out of the place," he says directly to the camera.

In an interview with ABCNews.com, Quayle said he knew his comment would be controversial but it was not a claim he "made lightly."

Obama, he said, "increased the national debt by astronomical levels and left our borders unsecured."

Being the son of a well-known politician and the most successful fundraiser in a field of 10 Republican challengers has made Quayle a target in the lead-up to the Aug. 24 primary

The gravitas of Wednesday's commercial -- and it's timing -- has done little to tamp down allegations that Quayle wrote for a saucy website featuring gossip and racy photos from Arizona's nightlife scene.

Quayle said he wrote the copy for his latest Obama ad, but flatly denied he wrote a popular column on the website about Scottsdale nightlife three years ago.

The founder of that site now runs another incarnation called thedirty.com.

"The website pushing these smears about me is an offensive and I've never had any association with that website," Quayle told ABCNews.com. "This is a smear campaign by my opponents."

Asked if he was playing with semantics to distance himself from the now-defunct original blog, Quayle said: "I made a couple of comments on a blog that doesn't even exist anymore that doesn't have the character of this blog now."