‘Bleeding Heart Conservative to the Rescue

Jack Kemp is a much better choice for vice president than Dan Quayle. Kemp can spell potato, and although he holds some progressive positions on poverty and immigration, Kemp’s hard line on abortion and profound faith in the gold standard will reassure the Buchanan fringe.

Then there’s the ever popular anti-Washington angle that the Republicans mean to exploit. Kem only served in the federal government for 22 years, which is less than Dole’s 36, so it will be easier to pin every bad deed ever done by the U.S. government on Clinton’s four years away from Arkansas.

Aging baby boomers will find it thrilling that the 61-year-old Kemp is thought to add youthful vigor to the Republican team. It is also encouraging to us older guys looking for second careers that “Loose Lips” Kemp, who was rejected as a running mate by Ronald Reagan and George Bush, has finally found a Republican presidential candidate desperate enough to put him on the ticket. It means that you can screw up and still be given another chance, even by a former adversary long contemptuous of your most deeply held views.

Kemp’s major political distinction was his selling Reagan on the funny money scheme of supply-side economics, thereby undermining Dole’s efforts to balance the budget without hurting rich farmers or defense contractors dependent on the dole.

Kemp has long opposed a balanced budget amendment, which Dole champions, and until he fell behind in the polls, Dole thought that the red ink that supply-sider Kemp had encouraged was the main menace to civilized society.

“Bob Dole never met a tax he didn’t hike,” Kemp charged in the 1988 Republican primaries. Dole shot back in his inimical macabre style: “The good news is that a busload of supply-side economists just drove off the mountainside. The bad news is that three seats were empty.” But now Dole has abandoned deficit-cutting for a $500-billion, Christmas-in-August tax cut that would put the nation quickly into Chapter 11.

I’m trying hard to be upbeat about the Dole campaign, and Kemp does have his good side. It is encouraging that at least one member of the ticket is not in favor of blowing up the Statue of Liberty, immigrant bashing now being the party norm. The Republican platform, written to the specifications of the Dole campaign, would amend the Constitution to deny the guarantee of citizenship to all people born here. Kemp refuses to forget that we are a nation of immigrants, and his principled opposition to immigrant bashing, including California’s Proposition 187, was louder than that of many leading Democrats.

At a time when Democrats no longer want to speak up for the poor for fear of embarrassing their president, it is wonderful to have Kemp to float one plan after another to “empower” those “left behind.” None of his plans, including those concocted when he was the totally ignored housing and urban development secretary under Bush, has amounted to anything, but give him an “A” for rhetorical effort. Sad to say, but I trust him more than Clinton, at least to remind us that the poor are not entirely responsible for their poverty.

But Kemp, a self-described “bleeding heart conservative,” is not the Republican presidential candidate, and that man is already committed to a nastier course. How these guys manage to both slam and praise immigrants while appealing to the prejudices of pro-187 Californians will make for great reading in the next spate of campaign insider books. But this time, perhaps the truth about the shameful manipulation of the campaigns will be available to voters before they vote.

Kemp is one of the great blabbermouths, and he will not go quietly into the silent dark night of wannabe vice presidents. There is no way that the Dole camp will be able to shut Kemp up when he has long internalized and often articulated that he, and certainly not Dole, is the only one who’s truly qualified to be president.

But Kemp has his uses. It’s wacky time in San Diego when governors Pete Wilson, George Pataki and William Weld are considered too progressive to address a GOP convention in which one out of five delegates is a millionaire. Kemp is the one person with the verbal dexterity to be the barker for the Republican circus. Who better to square the circle and tell us how we can be tolerantly intolerant and balance the budget by increasing the debt, reach out to women by denying them control of their bodies and be inclusive of the poor and minorities while the candidate refuses to even speak to the NAACP convention? Poor George Bush; all he had was a modicum of integrity and Dan Quayle.