Fraser, Michigan

“What is capital?” Jack Kemp asks as he paces in shirt sleeves and wireless microphone before a crowd of factory workers. It is the morning after Labor Day, and the Republican nominee for vice president is on the floor of ISI Automation, a robotics manufacturing plant in Macomb County, Mich., trying hard to explain Bob Dole’s economic plan to the hundred or so employees assembled. It’s not clear that the audience has understood his question, but Kemp answers it anyway. “This is capital,” he says meaningfully, pointing to his head. A look of incomprehension settles over the crowd. Some pull nervously on cigarettes, others shift their gaze to the floor. Just about everybody looks confused. But the candidate keeps going — indeed, quickens the pace of the lesson. Over the next ten minutes, Kemp gives short primers on supply-side economics (as he explains it, a concept first introduced by President Kennedy in 1962), the balance of world trade (the Northern Hemisphere, he says, is now “one big state”), and the relationship between management and labor (“The wage earner and the stockholder are the same person,” he explains, only at different points along life’s journey).