GOP Gets a Ticket to Ride

Although Jack Kemp spent more than a decade as a professional quarterback, it was Bob Dole who threw the political long bomb over the weekend, with Kemp acting as the receiver. The Kansan, to be officially selected this week in San Diego as the Republican candidate for president, chose the former congressman and housing secretary as his vice presidential running mate.

Dole and Kemp are an odd couple in many ways, which makes the ticket that much more interesting for political junkies. But does the selection of Kemp matter outside the circles of party activists and the journalists who cover them? That won’t be known until November, but Kemp should be able to help shore up the Dole campaign in some areas where it has been weak--assuming that Dole and Kemp can keep their past differences buried.

Presidential candidates often choose running mates with whom there is a natural political kinship; more important, they choose running mates who bring new and needed strengths to the ticket. Given the history of sniping between them, certainly Dole didn’t choose Kemp for any natural-kinship reasons.

Just five months ago in the GOP primary, Kemp endorsed not Dole, the clear front-runner, but publisher Steve Forbes. Back in 1988, when enthusiastic supply-sider Kemp was running for president himself, he said then-presidential rival Dole “never met a tax hike he didn’t like.” And around that same time, Dole was once heard to utter that Kemp should run for football commissioner, not president.

Of course at the GOP National Convention this week, the prayers of the party faithful are that the past is not prologue. Down 20 points against President Clinton in a nationwide Los Angeles Times poll, Dole is facing quite a challenge: No presidential incumbent with this large a lead so late in an election year has been defeated in the 40 years that detailed polling has existed.

But there’s no doubt that the energetic Kemp will give a much needed boost to what has been a lethargic and tin-eared Dole campaign. Kemp, a graduate of Fairfax High School and Occidental College in Los Angeles, should help the campaign in vote-rich California. Significantly, Kemp, while agreeing with Dole’s anti-abortion-rights stance, broke company with many in GOP officialdom by rightly opposing anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative-action measures. Unlike many who have only talked of the “big tent” that would welcome minorities into the GOP, Kemp has taken steps toward that goal.

Kemp thus should be helpful in gathering support from some moderates turned off by the intolerant agenda promoted by some hard-liners in the GOP. Ultimately, though, even a clever vice presidential choice takes a presidential hopeful only so far: Voters will make their choice based on how they feel about Dole or Clinton, not Jack Kemp or Al Gore.