Kemp Still Wondering Where He Fits Into GOP Picture : Weighing another presidential bid, he’s unsure if voters are interested in his ‘compassionate conservatism’

At this moment of Republican euphoria, Jack Kemp is strangely subdued. Like all Republicans, he’s enthusiastic about the prospect of taking back the House or Senate, or both. But he is uncertain that the sleek, sharp-edged GOP machine now driving briskly toward power has any room for his brand of “compassionate conservatism”--with its missionary fervor about reviving the inner cities by bringing capitalism to the poor.

“I don’t know,” he said over breakfast in a Pensacola, Fla., hotel a few days ago. “I’m not feeling beleaguered, but I am feeling I have had a setback somewhat. Because I don’t know there is much of a constituency for that right now.”

Kemp sighed; it had already been a long day. At 5:30 that morning, he was standing under a light drizzle in a muddy field on a quiet street helping the volunteer organization Habitat for Humanity raise a house for a widow and her three children. The night before, he delivered a gracious and generous speech at a reception for those who had gathered to hammer and plaster and saw: All Americans, he said, shared an obligation to end “the stain . . . of people without homes, people without hope.” It was a speech almost impossible to imagine from any of Kemp’s potential competitors for the 1996 GOP presidential nomination.

After Kemp spoke, Millard Fuller, Habitat for Humanity’s gently indomitable founder, came to the microphone and, by way of thanks, said: “He’s a Republican, but he’s a human being.” Well-intentioned, the remark cut into Kemp like shrapnel. Later that night he repeated it at a fund-raiser for the Florida Republican Party. “I don’t ever want that to be said again,” he said. “The party has to care about every single city, every single inner city. Every single child of God. We are not going to be entrusted with government at any level if we cannot prove we understand we must leave no one behind.”

In one form or another, Kemp has been preaching that sermon for more than a decade, as a young congressman, an unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1988 and an exuberant housing and urban development secretary who chafed under President George Bush’s disinterest in domestic affairs. After keeping a low profile during most of President Clinton’s first two years, Kemp’s now traveling the country, campaigning for Republican candidates and, by his own account, “testing the waters” for another presidential bid.

Will he run? “I think the critical people have a sense that Jack is running,” one supporter said. “That’s different in the past 30 days.”

Kemp has begun talking privately with GOP strategists like John Sears, the original architect of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. But in conversation, Kemp still sounds genuinely conflicted. Partly his hesitation springs from the usual concerns: Can he raise the money, build the organization. But there is a larger issue: Are enough Republicans still interested in what he has to say?

Kemp’s message has always been an odd hybrid: one part supply-side economics, the other social gospel--an improbable mix of Arthur Laffer and Dorothy Day. In Pensacola, when he wasn’t lecturing about empowering the poor, he was proselytizing for capital-gains tax cuts, tariff reductions and a rollback in all the tax increases passed not only under Clinton but also under Bush.

As a political (if not necessarily an economic) matter, the tax cuts are fine: Republicans are turning back to cutting taxes as though rediscovering an old flame. But when Kemp says the nation cannot afford to leave anyone behind, he expresses a weight of social obligation that virtually no candidate in either party now dares to endorse.

That vision is especially discordant with the GOP’s message in this midterm campaign. Kemp joins in the Republican criticism of Clinton urban priorities--like a potentially vast public jobs program for welfare recipients and the $30-billion anti-crime measure with its cascade of new social programs. But across the country, Republicans this fall are not talking about Kemp’s alternative of rebuilding inner cities by expanding enterprise zones, slashing taxes on the working poor and subsidizing the sale of public housing to its tenants. Instead, they are offering the iron fist: cutting off welfare, cracking down on illegal immigrants, sending more violent teen-agers to jail.

Kemp feels alienated, almost besieged by all of this. “The party is coming dangerously close to being portrayed as (though) all we want is little government and big prisons,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting smaller government, less intrusive government, as a philosophical point, and there is certainly nothing wrong with defending the idea that violent criminals should be locked up. . . . But people want a bigger menu, they want a bigger vision of America.”

Without ever noticing the turnoff, Kemp now finds himself traveling a different road than most Republicans on issues of race and poverty. At a National Review dinner last spring, he confronted Edward I. Koch over a speech in which the former New York City mayor argued that the nation’s crime problem was essentially a problem of “black crime.” Last week, Kemp passionately denounced Proposition 187, the California ballot initiative to cut off public services to illegal immigrants, which is backed by Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, as a threat to civil liberties, racial harmony and “the soul of the (Republican) party.”

He bristles at the explosive suggestion in Charles Murray’s new book, “The Bell Curve,” that low IQ largely explains the poor’s predicament and virtually dooms them to poverty. “That’s ridiculous,” Kemp said. “I’m not a sociologist and I don’t have any empirical data to prove my point, except I believe that there is a spark of creativity in all of our people and the purpose of our society is to unleash that talent.”

He rolls his eyes dismissively at the emphasis on trying more juveniles as adults. And although he denounces the existing welfare system as a “cancer,” Kemp doesn’t have much patience for Murray’s idea of eliminating welfare benefits for women who bear children out of wedlock--a proposal that has generally transfixed conservatives. Better, Kemp says, to expand “economic, social and educational mobility” through tax breaks, job training and school vouchers.

“This is what gets me,” he said. “If conservatives believe that government can cause problems by incentivizing the wrong thing, why don’t they believe that government can reverse its policies and encourage productive human behavior . . . (like) families and work and saving. We are great as conservatives at saying how bad government is. Why can’t government do the right thing?”

Such intemperate optimism has opened Kemp to charges of naivete from left and right alike. Liberal critics see him slighting the role of government by depending on private-sector incentives to combat poverty; conservative critics disparage his emphasis on economic opportunity as a refusal to accept the cultural diagnosis of inner-city chaos that constitutes the cutting edge of conservative social thought. On the right, some whisper Kemp’s time has already passed, before it ever entirely arrived.

Effusive, voraciously empathetic and prolix, Kemp is an easy target for both sides. But amid intensifying racial and political polarization, he is a rare voice of inclusiveness--insisting that the GOP can become a majority only by attracting more blacks and Latinos through demonstrated concern for the poor and the underclass.

Today, most Republicans, and even many Democrats, worry less about including the underclass than isolating it through tougher law enforcement and the reduction of welfare benefits. Although no one will say as much, that agenda approaches a strategy of quarantine. If Jack Kemp has a future in national politics, he will have to convince the Republican Party that’s not enough of an answer to America’s most pressing social problem, and right now he’s not sure he can.

The Washington Outlook column appears here every other Monday.

Profile: Jack Kemp

Born: July 13, 1935

Home town: Los Angeles

Education: Occidental College, B.A., 1957

Career highlights: Professional football quarterback for the San Diego Chargers and Buffalo Bills, 1957-70; Army, 1958; special assistant to Gov. Ronald Reagan, 1967; special assistant to the chairman of the Republican National Committee, 1969; congressman from New York, 1971-1989; secretary of Housing and Urban Development, 1989-92

Personal: Married, four children

QUOTE

“This is what gets me. If conservatives believe that government can cause problems by incentivizing the wrong thing, why don’t they believe that government can reverse its policies and encourage productive human behavior . . . (like) families and work and saving. We are great as conservatives at saying how bad government is. Why can’t government do the right thing?”