Campaign Portrait

By Alessandra Stanley/Washington

Promising to expand the Reagan revolution, New York Congressman Jack Kemp plunges enthusiastically into the presidential race. This is the fourth in a series of profiles of the major 1988 contenders.

The candidate strode genially from table to table, hands outstretched, making fingertip contact with smiling ladies at a luncheon in Manchester, N.H. An elderly woman grabbed him by the sleeve and yanked him to her side. "There are too many foreigners buying up our land," she complained. He bent down next to her chair. "Aw, come on," he chided, "don't look at it as a zero- sum game. We want people to invest in America." She listened sullenly as he tried to explain his vision of an unfettered free market. "Well, you think about it," she interrupted, shaking her finger. He masked his exasperation with an affectionate pat on the back. "I will," he promised, "but you think about it too."

Jack Kemp, 51, the New York Congressman and former pro- football quarterback (for the Buffalo Bills), once thought he would end up as a coach or teacher. Even now that he is campaigning for President he cannot suppress the urge to enlighten, to pounce on a negative outlook and offer an optimistic economic vision in its stead. His fervent embrace of the supply-side faith and its feel-good gospel of growth is more than just a political platform. It is a personal creed that has fueled his career and helped him develop a blend of conservatism and blue-collar populism that he sees as the natural extension of Ronald Reagan's legacy.

The past year has been troubling for Kemp's campaign. His hope of turning the Republican race into a Kemp-Bush contest failed; though Iranscam deflated George Bush's lead, Robert Dole emerged as the main alternative to the Vice President. As Kemp makes his formal announcement this week, there is whispering that his candidacy can't get off the ground.

Part of Kemp's problem thus far has been that he seems more comfortable promoting ideas than selling himself. When proselytizing about his economic theories -- the virtues of tax cuts, the need for currency reform and a dollar "as good as gold" -- he displays the earnest exuberance of a junior professor addressing a pep rally. Beneath the hearty veneer and football-star luster, Kemp harbors a curious personal reticence. When asked what his appeal is to voters, he answers, "I think my ideas are popular, and I think I can articulate them as well as anyone."

The ebullient Kemp, a conservative mirror image of Hubert Humphrey, loves to talk. When he is minutes into a speech, his head bobs back and forth, as if straining against a too-tight collar and tiepin. He plants his feet far apart and unfurls his arms, flexing his fingers to pantomime an expression like "quote, unquote." He speaks so quickly, using so many facts and historical allusions, that he often fails to engage his audience. His aides have given him a digital stopwatch to remind him to keep it short.

To solidify his conservative base, Kemp has been intensifying his opposition to abortion, agitating for early deployment of Star Wars and bashing Secretary of State George Shultz for being too moderate. But Kemp does not fully resonate with the New Right moralists and movement conservatives on the party's right wing. The libertarian streak in his philosophy makes him more comfortable talking about tolerance and individual rights than about imposing social and religious values; his sense of optimism makes him shy away from tapping the resentments that can fuel an ideological crusade.

His wife Joanne, 50, a devout Christian, calls his politics of inclusion the "good shepherd" model. Kemp likes the metaphor. Republicans, he believes, must reach out to minorities, women, blue-collar workers and even organized labor. He has been a longtime supporter of civil rights and feels it was a historic mistake for Republicans not to be at the forefront of that movement.

Kemp's intellect seems to reflect a dogged fascination with ideas rather than a natural brilliance. He talks about ideas the way immigrants talk about America: it is the passionate love of the convert. Football consumed his life throughout his childhood in Los Angeles and his years majoring in physical education at Occidental College in Southern California. Not until he was newly < married and playing professionally did his focus broaden. He worked for Governor Reagan in 1967, and read Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative and Ayn Rand's libertarian-positivist novels, such as The Fountainhead. In the mid-'60s he discovered Friedrich von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, a paean to free-market economics, and "from then on it was Katie-bar-the-door," he recalls. "I read everything I could get my hands on about economics and political philosophy."

When Kemp arrived in Washington in 1971, a boyish-looking Congressman representing the Buffalo area, he embraced the notion of growth through tax cuts with a firebrand's unnuanced zeal. Obviously ambitious, he seemed shallow, and he compensated by bolstering his rhetoric with sweeping historical references and obscure names. "He's more secure now," says his earliest supply-side guru, Jude Wanniski. "He doesn't feel the need to drop Von Hayek's name in every speech." (Even now Kemp cannot always resist. He recently cited Jean Francois Revel and Lord Acton to a group of senior citizens in Fort Dodge, Iowa.) He remains a voracious reader. On plane rides, he devours biographies and history books the same way he reads newspapers -- scanning and mentally clipping ideas and facts that support his world view.

He does not relish the underbelly of politics, the gossip and tactical stalking. After a political event, he retreats to his airplane seat, ignoring his aides' shoptalk, occasionally looking up from his reading to say, of a fact or quotation, "Wow, look at that!" Muses his friend Tom Kean, Governor of New Jersey: "He's not much different in private than in public. When he calls, he's always excited, trying out new ideas or telling me about some new book or article."

Off the podium, Kemp reverts to a Southern California vernacular. Things he likes, from his family house in suburban Maryland to the flowering of capitalism in the Third World, are "really neat." He is proud of his erudition, using French phrases like elan vital, but he sometimes tosses out strange neologisms, like "braggadocious." His tastes are unabashedly middlebrow. He saw the musical Les Miserables three times and with characteristic gusto has become a one-man ad for the show, telling people that "it's the best musical since Man of la Mancha."

At home Kemp relaxes in his book-lined den with football trophies and framed family photographs crowding the mantle. A giant black satellite dish ! connected to his 20-inch RCA television allows him to watch most of the games of his eldest son Jeff, a backup quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. He hates the campaign travel, hates being separated from his family.

But he enjoys one element of the race. "The fun of the campaign," he insists, "is to actually say to someone, 'Look, I really believe we could restore a 5% prime rate.' " He gasps, as if to fill in the listener's incredulous response. "Now, someone is going to say, 'Jack Kemp, you're crazy.' But I really believe we can have low long-term interest rates and 7% mortgage rates, and reduce unemployment in our cities by half." He pauses and leans back in his chair, enveloped in his own earnestness. "That's why I am in it. That's all I'm in it for."