Kemp Tackles His Job as GOP Economics Lecturer With Gusto

Jack Kemp heads up the Economics Department at Bob Dole University, standing at the lectern before a reluctant nation and pounding home the three C’s: Cut income taxes. Cut capital gains taxes. Cut inheritance taxes.

It’s a tough job, economics education, explaining the complexities of the Republican presidential ticket’s tax relief plan to a country that barely balances its checkbooks. But especially during the last few days, as Dole and Kemp have separated on the campaign trail, the vice presidential candidate has taken up the task with relish.

On Tuesday, Kemp stuck a wireless microphone on his shirt and literally lectured a group of about 250 blue-collar workers at ISI Automation, a robotics firm in suburban Detroit.

“What is capital?” he asked. He then quickly answered his own question, citing factors ranging from education to savings that he said give people buying power.

His “students” responded well to Kemp’s professorial approach, in part because he mixed his more academic rhetoric with plain-spoken examples of how the GOP economic proposal--particularly its call for a 15% cut in income tax rates--could directly affect their lives.

Indeed, when Kemp is good, he is very, very good at explaining the plan. His passionate belief that massive tax cuts will generate strong growth at all levels of the economy is a major reason he was tapped for the No. 2 spot on the GOP ticket.

As Dole himself said Tuesday, speaking to a group of small businessmen in Colorado Springs: “There’s no better salesman on this economic package than Jack Kemp. He loves this stuff. He eats it, he sleeps it.”

But when Kemp is bad, as he was during a stop in Phoenix last Saturday, just listen:

Kemp on the capital gains tax: “People say it’s not that high, it’s only 28%. It’s 28% but it’s unindexed. So if you have had a farm for 10 years or 15 years or a piece of real estate or a home or a piece of equipment or a stock, or a share of property in America and you’ve held it say from 1980 to 1996 the tax on that capital gain is close to, well, what is happening, it is eating the seed corn, it is eating up the oxygen supply, because what people are doing is using their assets to borrow.”

“Long-winded” is the operative term here, for like a professor with the dangerous luxury of tenure, Kemp does go on. And on. And on.

And as he does so, he provides examples of the concern some Republican political professionals expressed when he was tabbed as the vice presidential nominee: his tendency toward an undisciplined, arcane style on the stump that can leave his audiences bored and bewildered.

Kemp campaign director Wayne Berman defends the candidate’s occasional ramblings, saying the former football player, congressman and secretary of housing and development simply gets excited.

“He gets caught up in the enthusiasm of the crowds, and he wants everybody to get as excited he is about the economy,” Berman says.

Still, there are the times that Berman has found himself doing damage control in the wake of a Kemp discourse.

As he stood in a Montana wheat field Sunday, Kemp pushed the envelope of the Dole economic plan. The GOP presidential candidate, Kemp told his listeners, “wants you to be able to leave your farm to your children without having the government confiscate it in Washington D.C. We ought to eliminate the estate tax. It doesn’t even earn any revenue.”

Not so fast. The Dole plan merely calls for a “substantial reduction” in the inheritance tax, Berman told reporters when Kemp finally stopped talking. Dole, Berman cautioned, has called the elimination of inheritance or estate taxes merely “a goal.”

Kemp himself seems to realize the need to curb his urge to expound.

On Tuesday, at the start of the event at a social service agency on Chicago’s South Side, Kemp said: “I will try not to go into one of my famous lectures for an hour-and-a-half on international monetary policy. . . . “

Instead, he weaved his comments on economics and urban renewal with personal tales, partisan rhetoric and quotations from Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Even so, his style grated on at least one of his listeners.

“No one wants to be lectured to,” said Deborah Sawyer, president of the Chicago chapter of the National Assn. of Women Business Owners. “You want to be talked to.”

Kemp’s mobile classroom is likely to continue throughout the campaign: The stated task for him is “teaching and . . . and promoting the Bob Dole economic plan,” Berman says.

And the classroom will be found in some surprising places. “He’s going to do it with audiences that are different and unusual, in audiences where Republicans don’t go,” Berman adds.

Kemp’s stop in Chicago’s largely African American South Side Tuesday was an example of that, as was his trek last week through South-Central Los Angeles, where he talked about how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

When Kemp’s at the podium, there are very often audio visual aids: an audience decked out in T-shirts with slogans like “15% = JOBS” and “15% = HIGHER WAGES” referring to Dole’s proposed cut in income tax rates.

There are field trips: his Sunday stop at Raska Farm in central Montana, his Saturday afternoon visit to a Phoenix metals contracting plant called Industrial Mechanical.

And there are real life examples of Horatio Alger, like Jerry Hamler, an entrepreneur who was raised in the wake of the Depression by a grandmother who started the Phoenix metals company in his own garage and now employs 150 workers.

Kemp is “good, a lot better than Dole” in pushing the GOP economic plan, says Ruy Teixeira of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “He believes what he says. He projects a real belief that people aren’t doing well.”

At the same time, Teixeira expresses doubt in the ultimate persuasiveness of the supply-side economic theory that Kemp so fervently embraces; the idea, in Teixeira’s phrasing, that “if you make the rich richer, life will be better for the masses.”

Says Teixeira: “I don’t think people accept that. It’s asking them to believe a lot.”

As Kemp campaigns, it is important to note what he leaves out, as well as what he harps on. After boring listeners silly during long-winded speeches in an ill-fated 1988 run for president, he stopped talking about the gold standard, Malthusian theory and author Hannah Arendt.

But for all of his growing success in this national classroom, Kemp has yet to fully shake his early verbal tics, his fondness for quotations, his long and passionate asides.

And it’s lucky that most of his listeners are not taking notes; tape recorders are necessary in this man’s class.

“The very best way to reduce the size of government is to make the economy grow so big and allow people to do so well in the private sector that they don’t have to rely on government,” he recently lectured to big cheers.

“Government should do that which it can do; it ought not do that which it doesn’t do very well. It doesn’t create energy. Bob Dole and Jack Kemp want to eliminate the bureaucracy of the Department of No Energy.

“This is not slash and burn. This is not laissez-faire, 18th century, Darwinian, biological competition where only the fittest can survive.”

But that’s enough for one day.

Class dismissed.

Times staff writer Marc Lacey contributed to this story.