Jack French Kemp accepted his party’s nomination for vice president Thursday night with a script clearly written to reach beyond the Republican core and appeal to minorities, the poor and working Americans.
“I am putting our opponents on notice. We are asking for the support of every single American,” Kemp told the cheering throng in the San Diego Convention Center.
“Our appeal of boundless opportunity crosses every barrier of geography, race and belief in America.
“We’re not going to leave anybody out of this opportunity society. We may not get every vote but we will speak to every heart. In word and action, we will represent our entire American family. That’s what we must be all about.”
Since his selection as Bob Dole’s running mate a week ago, Kemp has been viewed as the one-man vehicle to champion broader appeal for the GOP, and the tone of his acceptance speech provided ample evidence that he already has begun the job.
Repeating the phrase he used when he met with Bob Dole a week ago in the presidential candidate’s home town of Russell, Kan., Kemp vowed to deliver the Republican message “from the boroughs of New York to the barrios of Los Angeles.”
Kemp’s speech was one of the most direct attempts yet by the GOP to answer criticism that the party is insensitive to minorities and indifferent to the poor.
In a speech that included a reference to slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., Kemp promised that one of the beneficiaries of the tax reductions the GOP promises to deliver will be “the struggling, single mother in the inner city” who will find it easier to work her way off welfare.
“American society as a whole can never achieve the outer reaches of potential so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair,” he said.
By way of giving a face to that despair, Kemp referred to an account chronicled by Alex Kotlowitz in “There Are No Children Here,” an account about two boys struggling to grow up in a Chicago public housing complex.
Asked what he would like to be when he grows up, the 10-year-old boy at the heart of the book replied, “If I grow up, I’d like to be a bus driver.”
“He said if I grow up. He said if, not when,” Kemp observed in his speech. “At the age of 10, he wasn’t quite sure he’d make it to adulthood.”
His remarks were received enthusiastically, with Kemp at one point trying to quiet the cheers by saying, “It’s coming out of my time.”
Delegates who heard the speech from the convention floor gave it high praise.
“He is vocalizing what all of us here tonight believe,” said Connie Johnsen, a 52-year-old Girl Scouts fund-raiser from Bismarck, N.D. “We are a party of hope, opportunity and vision. I feel very emotional right now, very excited about where we are going.”
Still, the remarks clearly were intended to reach an audience well beyond the one gathered here. The delegation itself includes few minorities and few people whose incomes are at or below the national average.
As a former member of Congress, former director of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and a former pro football quarterback, the 61-year-old Kemp has many credentials on his resume. But he left those qualifications unmentioned in his 25-minute acceptance speech, which invoked the names of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.
Instead, he chose to emphasize his humble beginnings, as the son of a truck driver in Los Angeles.
Kemp made a brief reference to the immigration issue saying emphatically, “My friends, we are a nation of immigrants.”
Using what he said were the words of Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, former Notre Dame University president, Kemp said, “The reason we must close the back door of illegal immigration is so that we can keep open the front door of legal immigration–and keep the light of opportunity lifted beside the golden door.”
He challenged the notion that the present level of economic performance is an acceptable one.
“On the eve of the 21st Century, in the middle of a technological revolution that is transforming the world in which we live–how can it be that so many families find themselves struggling just to keep even, just to get by? As long as it takes two earners to do what one earner used to do, how can we say this economy is good enough?”
He charged that the Democrats, not the Republicans, are elitists.
“They don’t have faith in the people. They have faith in government,” he said. “That is why they raised taxes on the middle class. That is why they tried to nationalize our health-care system. That is why today they say they are `unalterably opposed’ to cutting taxes on American families. That is the problem with all elitists, they think they know better than the people. But the truth is, there is a wisdom and intelligence in ordinary women and men far superior to the greatest so-called experts.”
