YOUNG VOTERS: BEWARE OF THE SPENDERS.

Byline: Michelle Malkin

OK, I admit it: I am a big fan of MTV's ``The Real World.'' It's a soap opera-documentary about seven strangers in their 20s who, for the benefit of their nosy generation's entertainment, live together for a few contrived months in front of MTV's cameras.

Most of the cast members are liberal or apolitical and worried more about breaking up or breaking out than about the breakdown of the nuclear family or the collapse of Social Security.

So far, only one self-proclaimed conservative has come out of the closet on the show - Rachel from The Real World 3. I thought of her last weekend when Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole announced Jack Kemp as his running mate.

Rachel, like many wide-eyed young conservatives, had something of an intellectual crush on Kemp. On one episode, she meets the shiny, happy quarterback and Bush Cabinet member at a GOP conference in San Francisco. They shake hands effusively for the cameras. She leaves awestruck and energized.

Energized. It's the word all the spinmeisters are now using to describe Kemp's effect on the Dole campaign. It's admittedly how I felt when I met Kemp briefly in June at Seattle's Zion Prep Academy, where he endorsed a grass-roots charter-school initiative on the November ballot in Washington state. He glad-handed vigorously. Bounded from classroom to classroom. Administered great bear hugs to all the kids. Pushed all the buttons.

But something is not quite right about the likable Jack Kemp. And contrary to GOP establishment talking points, it's not just the liberal media elite who think so.

As the longest-running Energizer bunny for supply-side economics, Kemp has relentlessly beat the drum for smaller, less-intrusive government.

He can stir the party faithful as well as the Hayekian theorists with impassioned paeans to liberty and limited government. Yet, throughout his public career, he has demonstrated a cavalier attitude about expansive social spending.

During his tenure at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Bush administration, he happily doled out Great Society-type programs with cute names like ``Operation Bootstrap.'' Under Kemp, HUD's budget bulged from $19.7 billion in 1989 to $28.1 billion in 1993 - not exactly a performance that will get him elected to the Government Cutters' Hall of Fame.

During his failed 1988 presidential campaign, Kemp ran a demagogic scare campaign that the AFL-CIO would be proud of. He pounded away at George Bush and Bob Dole for their support of mild efforts to rein in Social Security for future wealthy retirees.

Kemp said Republican Pete Du Pont's proposal partially to privatize the system for young workers would ``destroy'' the program.

On supporting any freeze in future benefits, he vowed that he ``never has and never will.'' He said that anyone who proposed reforming Social Security was a ``candidate for a frontal lobotomy.''

(Hey. Contrast this with what 25-year-old Heather Lamm, daughter of former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm, said at the Reform Party convention. ``We need to reform Social Security,'' she said, ``because it is, simply, unsustainable and will bankrupt this country if we do nothing. . . . Every social program that we want to spend money on - crime prevention, education - everything is sacrificed when we have to spend so much money on interest payments on the national debt, on soaring entitlement programs, on all of those things.'')

So what exactly would Jack Kemp cut, if not Social Security? In a famous exchange of letters printed by National Review a few years ago, Pete Peterson of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition challenged self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives to propose specific spending cuts to reduce the deficit.

Kemp responded by first chiding Peterson's plan to means-test Social Security and other explosive entitlements. ``There is a better way to bring down the deficit,'' he wrote. Reduce wasteful government spending, Kemp agreed, but avoid ``across-the-board austerity'' and instead target programs that could ``safely'' be reduced or eliminated:

``Obviously, it's impossible to run through them all here, but the laundry list includes: big-business export-enhancement subsidies, waste-water treatment subsidies, rural housing development or electrification, power marketing subsidies, and farm-price supports with their attendant administrative bureaucracies, as well as the NEA, the NEH, the SBA.''

All worth looking at, of course. But these programs together make up less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

``My feeling,'' Kemp told conservative journalist David Frum in a 1993 interview, ``is that if you have a contest between Scrooge - pure budget-cutting - versus Santa Claus, which is what the left offers, Scrooge loses. My view is that growth is the only political model that can compete with the Santa Claus of the left.''

In other words, if you can't win by advocating lower taxes and lower spending, propose a combination of lower taxes and higher spending. The sad thing is, he may be right.

Ultimately, Kemp will not make or break the GOP ticket in '96. But young voters committed first to the principle and practice of fiscal responsibility, and not to partisan politics, should be wary.

Until they stop playing Santa Claus, smiling political leaders on both the left and right are no friends of Generation X.

MEMO: Michelle Malkin is an editorial columnist for The Seattle Times.