PUNCHING UP THE TICKET

By RICHARD LACAYO AND MICHAEL DUFFY

For a moment last week, two traits of Bob Dole the lawmaker came to the rescue of Bob Dole the candidate--the ability to swallow your pride and to make peace with your past. To arrive at the astonishing choice of Jack Kemp as his running mate, a man who has spent a good part of his political career spearing Bob Dole, required both. Dole admitted as much in a Thursday-night phone call to Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, his successor as majority leader and a good friend of Kemp's. If Kemp was the one, Dole told Lott, it would be a signal to everyone of how seriously Dole wanted to win, for there could hardly be a tougher choice for him to accept.

Kemp is the one, and his anointment by Dole adds not just excitement but something like psychological fascination to the campaign. Dole, who has said he wanted his running mate to be "a 10," introduced Kemp on Saturday with the words "I got a 15," a play on the former quarterback's jersey number. As a matter of sheer political accounting, who can argue? Wildly popular with large segments of his party, Kemp also has the crucial potential to appeal beyond them. His support for immigration, school and housing vouchers and affirmative action gives him appeal to minorities and women voters who say the G.O.P. is too hard-nosed and exclusionary. "He's one of the few people in our party who has spoken in union halls and at N.A.A.C.P. conventions and has been applauded," says Dole senior adviser Charles Black.

As one of the chief congressional architects of Reagan's 1981 tax cuts, Kemp opens a direct channel in voter memory to the era of good feeling that was early Reaganism. Though not identified with the controversial Christian wing of the party, he also has the longtime pro-life credentials to satisfy them. Originally from California, he polls well in that crucial state, where Dole is trailing Clinton by 25 points.

Above all, Kemp is a man with vision and optimism to spare, the perfect antidote to Dole's asperity and narrow focus. But the potential for conflict that he brings to the campaign is also inescapable. Kemp the supply-side tax cutter and Dole the dogged budget balancer have been ideological enemies for almost two decades. At some point the political antagonism tilted into the personal. Kemp was partly responsible for the single most painful political betrayal in Dole's life. In 1985, after the supply-side tax cuts championed by Kemp were followed by an exploding federal deficit, Dole pushed through the Senate a politically daring curb on cost of living adjustments (COLAS) for Social Security recipients. To squeeze out a one-vote majority in the Senate, Dole had to arrange for Republican Pete Wilson, then a Senator from California, to be wheeled in from emergency surgery. But when the bill got to the House, Kemp, who still believed that growth spurred by tax cuts would make deep spending cuts unnecessary, got White House chief of staff Donald Regan to persuade Ronald Reagan to oppose it. The bill died after Reagan allied himself with none other than Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill to do it in. The episode helped Democrats regain control of the Senate the next year. Dole aides said Kemp would never be forgiven.

Even if that could be forgotten, there have been more recent offenses. Last March, in a typically quixotic move, Kemp endorsed the presidential bid of fellow supply-sider Steve Forbes, just eight days before Forbes withdrew from the race. Last month, after complaining in public that Dole had been slow to put together an economic plan, Kemp jumped in with his own highly publicized "growth seminar" on taxes, held in Washington.

Kemp can also be a variable asset on the stump, contagiously enthusiastic as a speaker but also long-winded and unreliable. Dole campaign officials are already wondering if he can be counted on to soft-pedal his differences with the candidate on immigration and affirmative action. And by his very incandescence and ambition, his untiring knack for putting himself out front, there's the danger that he will effectively turn the Dole-Kemp ticket into Kemp-Dole.

Yet knowing all the dangers, Dole had been playing with the idea of Kemp for some time. Since June the Dole team had been running background checks on a short list of Republican Governors and Senators that did not include Kemp. But from time to time Dole would startle some aides by asking, "What about the quarterback?" During the last week of July, Dole secretly dispatched his campaign manager, Scott Reed, to meet with Kemp and "test the waters." Reed was a logical go-between. He had worked on Kemp's 1988 presidential campaign and then served him as chief of staff when Kemp became Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under George Bush. But at that early meeting, neither Kemp nor Reed was able to take seriously the prospect of Kemp's joining the ticket. The ideological gap between Dole and Kemp was too wide and there had been too much bad blood between them.

Besides, by late last month Bill Bennett's name was rising fast on Dole's ever changing short list. While preparing for his July 30 speech praising the values of the sci-fi blockbuster Independence Day--a subject, and a movie, that Bennett had urged upon Dole--the two men spent several days on the road together. The night before the speech, Dole invited Bennett to a meeting at the Hotel Sofitel in Los Angeles. With his press secretary Nelson Warfield and California campaign chief Ken Kachigian also in the room, Dole talked mainly about his upcoming tax-cut proposals. When he asked Bennett how best to sell them to the public, Bennett was ready. "The person to push this economic plan," he said, "is Jack Kemp."

The first reaction all around the room was skeptical. The memory of Kemp's endorsement of Forbes, among many other slights, was still fresh. Bennett pressed on. "You've all worked with Jack," he told them. "I've worked with him. We all know he'll drive you crazy. But he believes in this stuff, and he sells it like nobody else." Bennett was nearly through when he added, "The main rap on this party is that we exclude people. Jack Kemp is the best antidote to that." Without specifying what he had in mind, Bennett urged Dole to think of giving Kemp a wider role in the campaign.

Around the time of that meeting, Dole also telephoned Trent Lott to ask what he would think of a Dole-Kemp combination. "Lott was stunned," according to one of the Senator's advisers, but spoke warmly of Kemp. Meanwhile, Dole seemed more interested in the possibility of bringing Bennett aboard. Grownup without being elderly, the best-selling author of The Book of Virtues possessed not only the intellect but the gravitas to shoulder the Dole campaign into a debate on values, where Dole himself moves reluctantly. Bennett is a Catholic, and the Dole team badly wants the Catholic vote; he is a man with government experience--drug czar, Secretary of Education--even if he was never an elected official, which is something of a virtue all by itself these days.

But Bennett gave no sign that he was interested in the job. When Dole tentatively asked him about it in late July, he replied that "Vice President is not something I'd be good at." Dole demurred, telling Bennett later that he would call him the next day. He didn't, but two days after the Hollywood speech Bennett phoned campaign manager Reed to reiterate that he wasn't interested. Reed called back to urge Bennett not to close the door; Dole was interested, he told him. Bennett answered only that he would think about it and get back to Reed, then left for a weekend of mountain climbing in Colorado.

Bennett called that Sunday to back out. If not you, Reed asked, then who? Again Bennett told him, "You oughta look at Jack." More and more, that was the thought in Dole's mind as well. His other potential choices were not panning out. For a while he had been keen to reach back to the Bush years for former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, but the onetime Wyoming Congressman, who has had a coronary bypass, wanted to remain in retirement. Michigan Governor John Engler got on Dole's bad side when he urged Newt Gingrich to shut down the Federal Government, a move Dole thought rightly would come back to haunt Republicans. Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, leader of another state Dole badly needs in November, enjoyed a brief boost up the list. But Ridge, pro-choice, would infuriate conservative Christians. So would New Jersey's pro-choice Governor Christine Todd Whitman, who opposes a ban on partial-birth abortions. Ohio Governor George Voinovich dropped out of the running early.

That left Senators Connie Mack of Florida and John McCain of Arizona, plus former South Carolina Governor Carroll Campbell. Dole, who has said frequently that he needed to be comfortable with his running mate, has always liked McCain. But the former Vietnam P.O.W. had his drawbacks, including being a member of the "Keating Five." Campbell is highly popular in the South, but since leaving the governorship he has been chief Washington lobbyist for the insurance industry, the ultimate in Beltway insider jobs.

The boyishly handsome Mack, a man almost as devoted to tax cutting as Kemp, could help Dole in Florida, a crucial state where he is neck and neck with Clinton. For a while Mack seemed to have the inside track, until party elders--including former President George Bush--cautioned Dole that Mack wasn't ready yet for a national stage. By last Wednesday, to the astonishment of some of his advisers, Dole was ready to make further serious contact with Kemp. Astonishment was also Kemp's reaction when Reed called on Wednesday to ask for a meeting that same afternoon to talk about the Veep possibility. Kemp even suspected that Dole might be setting him up. "Give me a break!" he said after the call. "He's just trying to bring the party together."

Despite his suspicions, Kemp talked for two hours that afternoon with Reed and agreed to a face-to-face session in Washington that evening with Dole. Though it was no more than a tentative discussion of the issues, with no specific questions about the vice presidency, things were already in motion and could only accelerate. Kemp went home afterward to talk over the future with his wife Joanne and their four children.

The next day, Kemp met again with Reed and Dole communication director John Buckley at the Key Bridge Marriott hotel outside Washington. Was Kemp ready, they asked, for the Dole campaign to start vetting his finances and other personal matters? Sure, Kemp answered, but he still wasn't certain he wanted the job; since leaving government, Kemp has earned a seven-figure income on the speaking circuit. A spot on the ticket, however, would instantly make him a contender again within a party that had put a question mark over his future. Even a losing campaign, if he performed well, would leave him as the likely front runner for the G.O.P. nomination in 2000. At about 4 p.m. Thursday, Kemp instructed an assistant to send Dole's lawyers his financial records.

Dole, meanwhile, had not yet decided whether to make Kemp the final offer. By mid-Thursday, word about Kemp was spreading so fast to the outside world that the Dole team put out a report that Mack and Campbell, along with Michigan's Engler, were still in the running. If Dole were to read about his choice in the newspapers before he actually made it, he might change his mind just to frustrate the leakers. As late as Thursday evening he called Lott and told him, "It's gonna be one of your two best friends--Kemp or Connie."

It was not until Friday night that Dole, who was by that time at his home in Russell, Kansas, finally placed the call to Kemp, catching up with him at a private airport waiting room in Dallas at 10:06 p.m. Tilted back in an upholstered reclining chair, with Elizabeth and his daughter Robin nearby, Dole spoke with Kemp for 21 minutes. "You've been on my radar screen for 45 days," Dole told him. "You just didn't know it." When Kemp got off the phone, he joked to a companion, "He asked somebody else."

Bill Clinton's advisers profess to be unconcerned that Kemp's arrival will turn the Dole campaign into a serious threat. While Dole and Kemp were performing their delicate courtship, the Clintons departed for a vacation in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where the President will spend this week feigning indifference to the Republican hoopla in San Diego. And Kemp? "We'll kill him on his economic ideas," says a White House strategist. The Clinton campaign was already running TV spots last week blasting Dole's Kemp-flavored tax-cut ideas as a "risky, last-minute scheme that would balloon the deficit." And Kemp's charisma, say the President's advisers, will only make Dole seem more inert.

For their part, Dole's aides are on guard against any signs of a creeping Kemp takeover of their campaign. Even before Kemp came on, there were occasional tensions between longtime Dole confidants such as Sheila Burke and Roderick De Arment and newer Dole lieutenants, such as Reed, who have worked for Kemp. Reed has tried hard to patch these differences, secretly dispatching Burke and De Arment to pick up Kemp in Texas late last week.

On Friday night, antennae went up among Dole loyalists at the news that Kemp had already called on John Sears, a powerful strategist for Reagan in 1976 and 1980, to join his team in San Diego. Even Kemp's friend Lott has cautioned Dole that "you'll need to make clear to Jack that there's only one President at a time." Dole is a shrewd enough campaigner to know that. When he called Kemp on Friday, he pointedly recalled an episode from his 1976 experience as Gerald Ford's running mate, when Dole made an unauthorized pronouncement on farm price supports. Ford was on the phone in no time to remind him that Ford, not Dole, was the candidate.

Did Kemp get the message? "Jack's got a long history of team sports," says Black, the Dole adviser. "He'll know what to do." True enough, but Kemp was a quarterback. Even on a team, that's a starring position.

--Reported by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum/Washington, James Carney and Tamala M. Edwards with Dole and Dan Goodgame/Pascagoula

With reporting by JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM/WASHINGTON, JAMES CARNEY AND TAMALA M. EDWARDS WITH DOLE AND DAN GOODGAME/ PASCAGOULA