DOLE, KEMP TAKE MESSAGE ON THE ROAD.

Byline: Adam Nagourney The New York Times

With one last display of fireworks and burst of confetti, Bob Dole and Jack Kemp bounded out of their nominating convention in San Diego on Friday morning, launching a campaign to change voters' views of the Republican Party and to turn the presidential election into a referendum on tax cuts.

``Fifteen, 15, 15 percent tax cut!'' Dole said at a farewell rally in San Diego before flying here Friday evening. ``Keep that in mind.''

``Jack and Joanne have four children and 11 grandchildren,'' Dole continued, gesturing to his running mate and his wife on the stage, and then explaining to a momentarily perplexed audience what had prompted that observation: ``Fifteen! Fifteen! Keep that in mind.''

Dole and Kemp began a three-day cross-country tour Friday morning with a comparatively restrained and moderately attended rally, on a platform set up behind a Hyatt hotel, within sight of the San Diego waterfront.

The Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees spoke for a combined 18 minutes to an audience made up mostly of convention delegates and hotel workers.

Dole and Kemp used the rally to reprise, and sharpen, the themes they presented Thursday night, when they accepted their party's nomination: A call for tax cuts, a sympathetic depiction of their party and an attack on Democrats as elitist defenders of big government.

But all the oratory and ceremony Friday - as well as the opportunity to watch Dole and Kemp begin the honeymoon of their political union with a three-day trip that will take them to Buffalo, N.Y., Springfield, Ill., and Pittsburgh Pa. - was overshadowed by the drama of Dole himself.

He was, from the start of the day, unrestrained in his elation, demonstrating at every opportunity his delight at having won a nomination he first sought 16 years ago.

Dole startled his aides at 9 a.m., when he emerged from his hotel suite and - with only a turn of his thumb and an ``okey-doke'' - announced he was heading downstairs for a speech to Republican leaders.

The former Senate majority leader, who had obediently followed the script drafted by his political advisers this week, was 45 minutes ahead of schedule. He showed up before most of the reporters and before Kemp himself, who came bouncing onto the stage just as Dole was concluding his remarks.

Dole greeted the crowd, many of them old friends from conventions past, with an oblique and poignant comment on how he viewed the events in San Diego, the ninth convention he had attended since entering politics in Kansas 43 years ago.

``I've been coming here since 1964 and I never got to talk last,'' he said, speaking to a hotel room full of Republicans. ``Last night it finally happened. I got to say the last word.''

``I'm now leaving full of excitement and full of enthusiasm and full of confidence,'' he declared.

The nomination his, Dole went on to needle his critics, many of them in his own party, who had complained that the candidate had failed to lay out a defining theme for his campaign. Dole told Republican leaders that while delivering his 57-minute acceptance speech Thursday evening, ``I saw my optometrist right there in the front row.''

``They say I don't have any vision,'' he continued. ``There he was, right in the front row. A man of vision. Twenty-twenty.''

Dole's aides said they intended to make the trip Friday and the rest of the weekend, including a visit to Kemp's adopted hometown of Buffalo, as an opportunity to reprise the themes of the convention and present the Republican ticket to the American people.

Dole's aides hope that the nominee and his running mate will, as a ticket, prove to be as politically successful as Bill Clinton and Al Gore were in the 1992 campaign, and thus there was a great deal of focus on the what they said.

These next few days will be noteworthy in determining whether Dole and Kemp will be able to continue to build on the themes and energy of the past two weeks.

Dole has a history of letting moments like this pass. The most recent was after his resignation as Senate majority leader in June, which, in the view of his aides, fizzled out after an initial burst of good publicity.

Still, Friday was given to celebration. And in an appropriately choreographed ending to a tightly produced week, Dole and Kemp opened their rally in San Diego by walking down a staircase from the ballroom level of the Hyatt to the sounds of ``Signed, Sealed and Delivered'' (the Stevie Wonder version).

Dole's campaign has, with increasing frequency, turned to Motown for the musical backdrop of its events.

Among those greeting the candidates at the rally was the cheerleading squad of the San Diego Chargers, where Kemp began his career as a quarterback in the American Football League. The scantly clad cheerleaders waved gold tassels at the candidates and their entourage as they made their way to the stage.

Dole's wife, Elizabeth, jerked her head back in what appeared to be astonishment when she caught sight of the cheerleaders. Smiling, she turned on her heels and worked the other side of the crowd. Dole chose to face the cheerleaders.

The primary political focus of the day, first in San Diego and then in a late afternoon rally here in Denver, was Dole's tax cut plan, which includes a 15 percent cut in income tax rates and a halving of the tax rate on capital gains.

Dole, anticipating a barrage of attacks from the Democrats on his plan at their own convention in 10 days, asserted that cutting income taxes, as well as halving capital gains tax, would not create a catastrophic reduction in government services.

``I would not propose a tax cut, and I would not have proposed the economic package, had I not been certain that we could achieve it without hurting Social Security, without hurting Medicare,'' he said.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--color) Republican presidential candidate BobDole is cheered at a kickoff rally in San Diego.

(2) San Diego Charger cheerleaders join Bob Dole and Jack Kemp on stage at Friday's send-off rally.

Associated Press