Kemp Spreads the GOP Gospel in County

Most of Jack Kemp’s rallies unfold like clockwork: The Republican vice presidential candidate speaks, the crowd claps and he moves on to the next stop. In campaign events routinely stacked with supporters, sometimes it’s difficult to see evidence that there is another side.

Not in Ventura County.

When Kemp was here in September, student protesters opposed to Proposition 209, the state ballot measure eliminating state-run affirmative action programs, shouted down the candidate’s wife, Joanne, at a rally in her hometown of Fillmore on her 60th birthday. That prompted a visibly perturbed Kemp to take the microphone and stick up for his wife.

On Thursday, local rallies featuring Kemp were again disrupted by protests sparked by the GOP presidential ticket’s embrace of the controversial ballot initiative.

About 50 students at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks surged forward and screamed, “No on 209!” when Kemp finished his speech at the gathering.

Earlier, in an outdoor rally before Ventura’s City Hall, Kemp was heckled by a handful of President Clinton’s supporters sprinkled among several hundred die-hard Republicans. Although they were few, it was difficult not to notice them.

“Racist!” Miguel Espinosa, an Oxnard resident in a gray sweater and matching fedora, yelled from the back of the crowd in a voice so booming it nearly drowned out Kemp’s.

Kemp responded by detouring for a moment from the stump speech that he now utters by rote.

Only he got a little mixed up about who occupies the White House these days.

“Let me just say to my friends out there who are carrying a couple of Clinton-Gore signs, I can’t think on Halloween of a scarier thing than four more years of Bob Dole and Al Gore,” he said. “They are defending the status quo, which [former President] Reagan used to say is a Latin phrase for the mess we’re in. It is a mess in Washington and the only way to clean it up . . . is to get rid of this administration.”

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That only made Espinosa angrier.

“What a lie!” he shouted. And then: “What a bunch of bull!”

Espinosa later explained that he was opposed to the Republican Party’s hard line on illegal immigration and its opposition to affirmative action programs, two issues that the campaign of GOP standard-bearer Bob Dole has pushed especially hard in California.

“The entire Republican movement is about hating minorities and separating the classes further than they are already,” Espinosa said. “I’m protesting for the underdog.”

Although there was some jockeying in the crowd as Dole-Kemp supporters attempted to put their signs in front of the Clinton-Gore placards, Kemp discouraged the crowd from booing the opposition.

“No booing,” he said. “This is not a football game.”

Daryl May, 18, of Ojai wore a Dole-Kemp sign on his head, Dole-Kemp stickers on his shoes and lofted a Dole-Kemp banner in the air. Predictably, he disagreed with Espinosa’s viewpoints and wished the Clinton-Gore signs were not there at all. Still, he viewed the whole spectacle as democracy in action.

“I’d probably be doing the same thing if Clinton were here,” he said. “He has his right to shout. I can understand that he feels discriminated, but I feel discriminated by the policies of this White House.”

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Susan Komar, who attended the rally with her 18-month-old daughter, Faith, came away delighted to see Kemp in her hometown.

“I can’t believe I got so close to him,” she said. “I was an undecided voter until Kemp got on the ticket. I’m just so thrilled that he came to Ventura. It says a lot about his commitment to California.”

At Cal Lutheran, the protesters mainly stayed mum during Kemp’s talk to a gathering of nearly 750 people. But as soon as he finished talking and moved into the crowd to shake hands, they began their noisy protest. Secret Service agents scrambled toward them. Sheriff’s deputies moved in to break up a fight.

“We feel that affirmative action has only been in effect 30 years, and America is still a racist environment,” said 19-year-old Tim Johnson, head of CLU’s African American Student Union, which helped organize the opposition. “We’re not asking for the government to give us anything, we just want to keep the door open.”

At the start of the rally, organizers tried to keep the small group to the left flank of the stage, even going so far as to place yellow police tape around the students carrying signs that lambasted 209 and supported Clinton. But the protesters quickly stepped over the tape.

Johnson said school officials originally told him anti-209 signs would not be permitted at the Kemp rally, but later relented.

“Kemp used to be a good guy, until he started running with Dole,” Johnson said. “The way I see it, Dole wants a return to the good old days, and we can’t let that happen.”

“I wish we had a better candidate,” said 24-year-old Jordan Egertson of Thousand Oaks, a musician who graduated from Cal Lutheran last year. “I think Kemp is one of the bright lights of the Republican Party, but he’s not at the top of this ticket.”

From the rally, Kemp retreated to a nearby conference room, where he and his wife filled out their absentee ballots from their home state of Maryland for Tuesday’s election.

Not surprisingly, he announced that they voted for the Republican ticket.

Staff writer Lorenza Munoz contributed to this story.

* CLINTON HERE TOO

President lands at Point Mugu on his way to Santa Barbara. B6