Dole Decides to Name Kemp as Running Mate, Sources Say

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole on Friday night picked as his running mate Jack Kemp, the former professional football star, congressman, Cabinet secretary and fervent advocate of supply-side economics, sources said.

The Dole campaign was withholding official word until a ceremony here today, but Kemp was reported to be bound for this small central Kansas town on a chartered jet late Friday night.

A source close to Kemp said: “It’s 100%. They are already printing up the signs.”

Throughout the day, speculation had targeted the silver-haired Kemp as Dole’s potential running mate. Late Friday night, campaign press secretary Nelson Warfield would not deny reports of Kemp’s selection.

“I will just say the curtain goes up tomorrow,” Warfield said. “We’re going to take back the White House, and we’ve added a great player to the stage with us.”

There is “an expectation that it’s Kemp,” said one top Dole aide Friday night. “We’re not steering people away from Kemp, but we’re not confirming it. We want Dole to make news tomorrow.”

Dole made the call at 8:06 PDT from the red-brick home on Maple Street where he grew up. Shortly into the 15-minute conversation, the yes came, Warfield said.

“It was a very upbeat and positive and energetic conversation,” Warfield said, carefully steering clear of revealing the running mate’s name. “They discussed both politics and policy issues. Sen. Dole was very excited to have his ticket underway.”

Interviewed Friday afternoon as he left Florida after a speaking engagement, Kemp, 61, generally deflected questions about his discussions with the Dole camp other than to quip: “Quarterbacks are always ready.”

Dole is scheduled to formally unveil his now-complete ticket here today at a rally at the courthouse where the former Senate majority leader served as a county attorney. He and his running mate then are to fly together Sunday to San Diego, where Republicans will hold their nominating convention.

For Kemp, that means he will spend the week of the convention just miles from where he first gained national attention--as quarterback for the San Diego Chargers in the early 1960s. He later played with the Buffalo Bills, then won election to the U.S. House from a Buffalo-area district. After almost 20 years in Congress and a failed presidential bid in 1988, he served as Housing and Urban Development secretary in the Bush administration.

The extent to which Kemp, a native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Fairfax High School and Occidental College, will give a boost to Dole’s campaign remains to be seen. But as word spread throughout Friday that he appeared to be the choice, the initial reaction from both GOP leaders and rank-and-file party members was highly favorable.

Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), a respected figure within the antiabortion movement and the chairman of the party’s platform committee, said Kemp’s selection would be “exciting.”

“I think he’ll bring vitality, energy, ideas” to the GOP’s national campaign, Hyde said.

Kemp is opposed to abortion, but he has a generally moderate record on other social issues. And he has pushed Republicans to make greater efforts to appeal to minorities. Referring to that, Hyde said: “He’s a master at outreach, something a winning party needs, especially one that’s down in the polls.”

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Signaling this potential attractiveness to a GOP ticket, Warfield said Kemp “is one GOP candidate who has broad appeal right off the bat to independents and Democrats.”

California Gov. Pete Wilson said that he believes Kemp would be “very well accepted” within the party.

Even a Democratic political consultant, Darry Sragow of Los Angeles, saluted the selection. “I think it’s a good choice. Not that I want Bob Dole to do well, but I think he will do better by naming someone who appeals to that vast middle that determines the outcome of general elections.”

But the mood was gloomy at the San Diego headquarters of Patrick J. Buchanan, Dole’s major rival in this year’s presidential primaries. Buchanan was not available for comment, but his spokesman, John Condit, grumbled about Kemp’s credentials as an authentic conservative.

“He’s got problems, and not just in the Buchanan camp,” Condit said, “because he’s moving steadily to the center. I don’t think he even considers himself a conservative.”

And among those Californians who fought for passage two years ago of Proposition 187, the initiative to deny public services to illegal immigrants, word that Kemp would be Dole’s choice was greeted with anger and dismay. That’s because Kemp earned their enmity by opposing the measure, a position that also put him at odds with Dole and the emerging 1996 GOP platform.

A conference of immigration-control activists took place Friday in downtown San Diego, just blocks from the convention site, and those attending warned that Kemp’s inclusion on the Republican ticket would be disastrous to Dole’s hopes of carrying California.

Barbara Coe, an Orange County-based activist who was a key organizer for Proposition 187, said: “Jack Kemp will be an albatross around Dole’s neck. Kemp has done immense damage to this country by his attitude towards illegal immigration.”

Kemp’s selection clearly fulfills at least one important criterion that Dole has been promulgating for months: that the choice be a surprise. Kemp was not on the “short list” of prospects that the Dole campaign had developed over several weeks, but he soared into contention over the last few days.

But the choice violated another criterion: that Dole must be comfortable with his running mate. One reason Kemp had not figured in the initial speculation was that he and Dole have long history of rocky relations.

Kemp is a forceful champion of stimulating economic growth through reducing taxes. But Dole, until this week, has been an acerbic critic of that approach, known as supply-side economics. Dole instead had preferred to cut spending and raise taxes to reduce the federal budget deficit. Even in proposing his 15% across-the-board reduction in income tax rates, Dole actually rejected the option Kemp preferred: a rollback of the 1993 and 1990 tax increases signed by Presidents Clinton and Bush.

During the 1980s, Dole and Kemp repeatedly clashed. In the 1980s, while Kemp was promoting tax cuts, Dole quipped that the thatch-haired politician was seeking a deduction for hair spray.

In a gesture aimed at reconciliation, Dole last year appointed Kemp to head a party commission studying the flat tax. But when Dole kept his distance from the group’s final report and sharpened his own attacks on the flat tax during the primaries, Kemp grew increasingly frustrated.

Finally, Kemp endorsed publishing magnate Steve Forbes, the flat tax’s chief booster in the GOP presidential race. The move came too late to help Forbes--Dole was clearly pulling ahead of the pack at the time--but it angered the Kansan. Even today some of Dole’s senior advisors consider Kemp to be disloyal and uncontrollable.

Indeed, one GOP insider who has known Kemp for years said the downside to a Kemp selection is that “he is quite full of himself, and he has this little history of kind of being a lone ranger, not particularly being a sensitive team player. He regularly bad-mouthed George Bush when he was his Cabinet secretary and wasn’t even discreet about it.”

Until Kemp’s name surfaced, the prominently mentioned finalists on Dole’s list of potential running mates were a cluster of mostly governors and senators who might deliver a state but were relatively anonymous to the rest of the country.

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High on the list were former South Carolina Gov. Carroll A. Campbell, Michigan Gov. John Engler, and Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Connie Mack of Florida.

Others contacted by the Dole search team included Govs. Tommy G. Thompson of Wisconsin, Jim Edgar of Illinois, George Voinovich of Ohio and Thomas J. Ridge of Pennsylvania. Some Dole aides pushed for former Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

Friday morning, in clipped answers to reporters’ comments on his campaign plane bound for Kansas, Dole said he “just about knew” by bedtime Thursday whom he intended to tap for what could be the most crucial decision of his campaign.

“Oh, yeah,” Dole said, when asked if he had reached a decision. “I went to bed and slept pretty good . . . because I just about knew.”

Campaign manager Scott Reed talked to Kemp on Thursday night and then again on Friday; Dole at the time was making an emotional visit to Abilene, Kan., the boyhood home of former president and fellow Kansan Dwight D. Eisenhower.

According to Warfield, Reed, in the first conversation with Kemp, “posed the question that has been offered to each of the contenders: ‘If the offer was forthcoming, would you accept it?’ Jack Kemp indicated that he would.”

The second chat was a “kind of take-your-temperature, see-where-you-are sort of update conversation,” Warfield said. “There were good vibes from that conversation.”

Standing beneath a three-story hackberry tree in front of the white clapboard house where Eisenhower grew up, Dole delivered a nonpartisan speech in which he pledged to continue the unfinished work of his “commanding general, political hero, military hero.”

Dole added: “I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t add another presidential library to the Kansas landscape.”

Once in Russell, he spent a part of his afternoon along Main Street. He and many residents called out to one another by first name, often exchanging physical expressions of fondness that Dole does not typically exhibit on the campaign trail.

As speculation swirled around Kemp on Friday afternoon, Dole told reporters here that he had not officially offered the job to anyone. He grumbled in his typical laconic fashion that early broadcast reports about Kemp’s selection being a done deal “are wrong.” The running mate post, he said at the time, “has been offered to no one . . . Made not a single call . . . Do that later tonight.”

A Kemp confidant said that as of 5 p.m. PDT, the call from Dole had not come. But he added that Kemp had expected to be contacted by Dole around 6:30, when Kemp arrived at a hotel in Dallas for a previously scheduled appearance.

At 6:30, however, Dole was dining at the house of his sister Norma Jean Steele. Reed and other top campaign aides were huddled in a trailer behind the Dole family home. Reed was calling the losers in the vice presidential sweepstakes, telling them the bad news.

Times staff writers Robert Shogan, Ronald Brownstein, Patrick J. McDonnell, Dave Lesher, Eleanor Randolph, Elizabeth Shogren and Bill Stall contributed to this story.