Kemp Says GOP Must Reach Out to Minorities : Politics: Likely 1996 contender declares he’ll help other candidates but only if they address racial issues. He rejects the party’s Southern strategy.

Jack Kemp, likely a strong candidate for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, has told GOP office seekers who want his help this year that he will campaign for them only if they actively canvass for votes in minority neighborhoods.

Kemp, a former Buffalo congressman who was secretary of housing and urban development in the George Bush Administration, is also warning Republicans that, unless the GOP begins reaching out to minorities, “we can’t win from a political standpoint and we can’t lead from a moral standpoint.”

A self-described “bleeding-heart conservative,” Kemp appears to be going hard against the grain of the predominantly white and conservative Republican electorate. He puts racial problems at the top of his agenda and says that they underlie almost all of the nation’s major social problems.

Most other potential Republican candidates have paid little or no attention to racial problems. And GOP Chairman Haley Barbour, commenting on Kemp’s stated position in answer to a reporter’s question, said that the party does not consider race or minority concerns an issue. Barbour agreed with Kemp, however, that Republican candidates should campaign in minority neighborhoods.

Kemp, in an interview, said that he does not want “the Republican Party, south or north, east or west, to do what unfortunately it has done all too often since the early 1960s--adopt a Southern strategy.”

The party first embraced a Southern strategy, aimed at securing the votes of conservative white Democrats, in 1964 and since then has largely ignored blacks to attract whites. The strategy helped the GOP make steady gains and become dominant over Democrats in some states in the South.

“The Southern strategy of not even asking blacks to vote for you for fear of losing white votes should be opposed by the Republican Party because we need ethnic and racial reconciliation and what better party to lead that than the party of Lincoln?” Kemp declared.

Republicans can no longer ignore the African American vote, Kemp said. In the 1992 presidential election, blacks cast 8.5% of the votes, and President Clinton got 82% of the black vote.

After Oliver L. North won the GOP senatorial nomination in Virginia in last week’s party convention, Kemp said he told the former Marine colonel that he would speak at his rallies only if the nominee campaigned in the black wards of Norfolk, Richmond and other Virginia cities.

“That’s my litmus test,” Kemp said, “and I’ve told others that, too.” He said North told him he would campaign in black neighborhoods “and I take him at his word. But I want to see evidence of it.”

Kemp, who ran for the GOP nomination in 1988, said that he would make his own decision about running for President in 1996 after this year’s elections. In several recent forums, he has extensively praised Gen. Colin L. Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a leading political figure who, he hopes, will run for political office as a Republican.

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Powell, who is black, has not been identified publicly as a Republican or a Democrat but Kemp said: “He most naturally would gravitate to the Republican Party. He’s a man of the center-right. I hope he runs for the Republican presidential nomination and picks me as his vice president. It would be good for the party.”

Kemp said that he is calling on all other Republican “potential or ‘wannabe’ or mentioned” presidential candidates to forgo GOP rallies and fund-raisers for 1996 until after the 1994 elections “so we can get more men and women in Congress who understand the major issues facing this country.”