CONVENTION '96: PUNCHING UP THE TICKET

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.