Michigan's Crazier Contest

By Amy Wilentz.

When Vice President George Bush arrived at the fashionable Amway Grand Plaza Hotel last week, a full police escort flanked his 15-car motorcade, and the cream of Grand Rapids society turned out, checkbooks at the ready. New York Congressman Jack Kemp made a less elaborate entrance: he arrived at the Midway Motor Lodge on the outskirts of town late one night and was lmet the next morning by grass-roots Republican activists with toddlers in tow. Although the next Republican presidential nominee will not be chosen for more than two years, Bush and Kemp find themselves already engaged in a lengthy scramble for delegates in Michigan.

Michigan's convoluted convention contraption moves into high gear on May 27, the deadline for filing petitions to run in the 5,904 precinct elections to be held in early August. Those selected will meet at district conventions in January 1988 to elect delegates to a state convention, and they in turn will choose the delegates who will go on to the national convention. Michigan's will be the first Republican delegates chosen, and that may help the state steal some of the thunder from the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. But as former Governor George Romney, 78, notes, "It's completely out of hand."

Part of the reason it has got out of hand is that Bush and Kemp are both making the Michigan precinct races a test of their early strength. Bush has been in Michigan seven times in the past year; Kemp has visited nine times since the beginning of 1985 and returns again this Saturday.Bush's political- action committee has raised some $400,000 in the state, $150,000 of which will be spent there; the Michigan Opportunity Society, which supports Kemp, will have raised and spent about $150,000 by May 27. Although Robert Dole and Howard Baker have pretty much shunned the fray, Television Evangelist Pat Robertson's Freedom Council, his educational charity, is busy recruiting potential precinct candidates.

The Bush-Kemp duel in Michigan, as elsewhere, exemplifies the clash of cultures within the Republican Party. The Vice President's team consists primarily of mainstream moderates, country-club conservatives and most of the state party elite. Bush, who beat Ronald Reagan in Michigan's 1980 primary, never misses a chance to stress his ties to the popular President: "I was on the phone with the Situation Room this morning," he told supporters at several stops as he discussed the Soviet nuclear accident. Instead of propounding a personal vision for the future (dangerous for a Vice President at this stage of the campaign), Bush stresses the need to continue Reagan's policies.

Kemp is far scrappier and more visceral in his appeal. His punchy, populist style is particularly effective with Main Street and back-street types, both the blue-collar conservatives and the "new-collar" workers in service and clerical jobs. They have little allegiance to Big Business and the country- club set, like Kemp's enthusiasm for what he calls the "opportunity society," and identify with his antiestablishment attitudes and New Right values, such as opposing abortion. One of the original apostles of supply-side tax cuts, Kemp stresses economic growth over budget balancing and touts his vision of a flat tax, "where you could fit your return on a postcard." Unfortunately for Kemp, he and Robertson are wooing the same voters.

For Bush, a strong showing in Michigan could help overcome his recent, virulent case of front runner's disease, characterized by frequent gaffes magnified by Washington insiders. For Kemp, who despite his personal and philosophical intensity has so far failed to attract a broad spectrum of Republicans, Michigan offers a chance to prove that he warrants the publicity he has been getting as Bush's main rival. But the murky Michigan system, which will no doubt produce claims and counterclaims and new ripples in the expectation game, may only complicate both of their tasks.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington and William J. Mitchell/Detroit