Kemp Brings a ‘Correction’ to GOP Message

When Jack Kemp and several of his oldest political allies gathered for a private dinner last month, the evening took an unexpectedly emotional turn.

Partway through the meal, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) angrily accused Kemp--who had publicly expressed frustration with the direction of the GOP-led Congress--of not being a team player, according to one source familiar with the discussion.

His own voice rising, Kemp fired back at Gingrich, “I had no choice, because there is no one in my party listening to my ideas.”

That was how profoundly the man now standing beside Bob Dole felt himself exiled from the GOP only a few weeks ago.

In summoning back Kemp from his own private Elba in the office of a Washington think tank, Dole has made a bold attempt to define the presidential ticket from below--and to shift the spotlight from the hard-edged image of the Republican Congress toward Kemp’s sunnier brand of “compassionate conservatism.”

By picking Kemp--just as by choosing Colin L. Powell to anchor the convention’s opening night--Dole has implicitly acknowledged that the GOP could not hope to triumph this November solely on the agenda of retrenching government that has consumed the current Congress since it first took power in January 1995.

In pointed contrast to those priorities, Kemp--much like Powell in his speech--insists that government has a legitimate role in uplifting the poor and providing a social safety net.

“This is something of a mid-course correction,” says Pete Wehner, the policy director at Empower America, the conservative think tank that Kemp co-founded. “Over the past year and a half we tested the limited government proposition and we found that it wasn’t overly successful.”

The Extremist Label

Indeed, over the past year, the Republican Congress has seen its approval rating steadily erode as President Clinton and other Democrats have worked to stamp it as “extremist” on the budget, the environment and other issues. In selecting Kemp--rather than, as Wehner notes, anyone who embodied the Republican “revolution” of 1994--Dole has dramatically signaled his desire to wipe clean the slate and recalibrate the party’s message.

“Clinton has been able to unify the Democratic Party around a defensive theme of stopping the Republican Congress,” says economic consultant Jude Wanniski, a confidant of Kemp’s for 20 years. “Now [by picking Kemp], what Dole is saying is, ‘We are not going to smash our head into the center of those barricades anymore.’ ”

Although Kemp has said he will defer to Dole’s judgments on issues where they disagree, his selection marks a return to the table for factions in the party that have felt disaffected from the Republican-led Congress.

A hero to conservatives in the 1980s, Kemp in the 1990s has been more likely to be praised by moderates--precisely the type of Republican voters who now say they intend to support President Clinton this fall.

Kemp may prove a compelling draw for those voters, precisely because he has shared many of their concerns.

Though he is in the conservative mainstream in his passion for cutting taxes, Kemp has departed from conservative orthodoxy on a formidable array of other issues--regularly placing himself in conflict with Dole in the process.

Historically, the most heated dispute between Kemp and Dole centered on Kemp’s insistence that tax cuts should take precedence over budget balancing. But Dole has effectively settled this dispute, for now, by calling for a Reagan-style 15% across-the-board tax-rate cut even while still promising to balance the budget in 2002.

Other differences remain unsettled--particularly on social issues with racial overtones. With his focus on reaching out to minority voters, Kemp has strongly opposed reductions in the level of legal immigration, while Dole has called for modest reductions.

Dole supported California’s Proposition 187, which sought to cut off virtually all public services to illegal immigrants. Kemp denounced the measure. Kemp also opposes the congressional Republican proposal to allow states to evict the children of illegal immigrants from public schools; Dole has endorsed the idea.

While critical of race-based “quotas,” Kemp has similarly criticized Republican proposals to eliminate affirmative action programs.

All of these issues speak to Kemp’s intense discomfort with appeals that divide voters by race. “You elect congresspeople and governors perhaps on issues like that, but you don’t elect presidents on issues that would fracture whatever chances we have of reconciliation in our society,” he said in an interview last year.

Likewise, Kemp passionately resists the rising current of economic nationalism in the party--saying that he would “quickly extend” free trade agreements, even as Dole has called for a “breathing space” before bringing new countries into the existing agreement with Canada and Mexico.

But in many respects, Kemp remains entirely in tune with the consensus in conservative circles.

Though less identified with the issue than some conservatives, Kemp is strongly opposed to legalized abortion. During the 1970s, he voted for an early effort to prevent federally funded family planning agencies from counseling patients about abortion--the so-called “gag rule.” In his 1988 presidential campaign, Kemp called for speeding up the drive against legalized abortion by seeking to overturn Roe vs. Wade with a simple congressional statute, rather than a constitutional amendment.

Kemp on Defense

Kemp shares the conservative priority on maintaining a high level of defense spending, and embraces the GOP’s call for decentralizing authority from Washington to the states, and from government at all levels to voluntary and charitable organizations.

And though not as enthusiastic as the average Republican House member about large-scale budget cuts, Kemp was bitingly critical of Clinton’s budget and health care plans.

But Kemp’s vision of government still departs from the prevailing conservative view. Unlike conservative leaders such as House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), Kemp rejects the idea that retrenching government is the critical step toward creating a better society.

Though dubious of direct government spending programs, Kemp argues that government can structure incentives that would ameliorate social problems. From that perspective flows his calls for tax breaks that would encourage investment in the inner city and subsidies to allow tenants of public housing to buy their own homes. On welfare reform, he is more enthusiastic about offering carrots--such as allowing welfare recipients to keep more of their earnings and accumulate assets--than the sticks of time limits and benefit cutoffs.

Liberals argue that Kemp’s solutions of tax breaks and vouchers are inadequate to the scale of his concerns. But Kemp’s insistence that the poor would respond to economic incentives also places him sharply at odds with the solidifying consensus among conservatives that poverty is now rooted in moral breakdown.

In the past few months, there have been some signs that other Republicans shared Kemp’s fear that the party was focusing too heavily on retrenching government--what Wanniski, the Kemp confidant, calls “the dark side” of its message.

Political Resurrection

But none of these straws in the wind--such as Dole’s embrace this spring of a tax credit to encourage more charitable giving and the unveiling of an urban “empowerment” agenda by some young House conservatives--were powerful enough to suggest anything approaching the resurrection that Kemp has experienced this week.

For many here, the only force sufficient to explain such an unexpected turn of events was the Dole campaign’s recognition that it needed a bold move to broaden the party’s appeal and jump start his seemingly stalled campaign.

“If Bob Dole had walked into this thing trailing Bill Clinton by five points,” says veteran GOP consultant Lyn Nofziger, “he wouldn’t have picked Jack Kemp.”

Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this story.