Jack Kemp
Kemp was a total blue-sky guy, which made him very likable, but not entirely credible as a politician. I covered both of his presidential campaigns, watched his unlikely alliance with Bob Dole--your classic thundercloud guy--in 1996, and spent more than a few hours talking about urban issues in his office.
He was a happy ideologue, a supply-sider nonpareil. He was the rare Republican who really cared about the poor and about people of other races--his athletic career had taught him the foolishness of racial bias--and he had some good ideas about how market incentives might be more effective than old-fashioned governmental responses in the inner cities. But his essential optimism blinded him to the limits of his ideology; he actually believed that tax cuts would always generate more revenue.
Kemp was, in a way, the John Edwards of the Republican Party--without Edwards' personal problems, of course. Both were smooth and attractive, and not very rigorous when it came to policy. In 2005, the Council on Foreign Relations sent Kemp and Edwards to Russia to make a report and come back with recommendations. They made both...but somehow managed to come back without any recommendations on the most important issue: nuclear disarmament, the Nunn-Lugar program, which the Bush Administration had foolishly let lapse.
It was Kemp's sunniness that I'll remember most, and his essential decency. He was a very unlikely politician for the Republican Party, the diametric opposite of Dick Cheney. His passing is a reminder that if the GOP needs anything right now, it is more Jack and less Dick.
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1
"If the GOP needs anything right now, it is more Jack and less Dick"
There are more dicks in the republican party right now than there have ever been before. We know it. They don't. -
2
Well we know there are plenty of green sky Republicans.
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What most proud modern Republicans will take from this article is that if you want to insult someone, call them a coward, spit on their lifestyle, take away their opportunities, poison their backyard, or prepare to blow their head off with the slightest excuse, you better smile broadly before you do it. -
3
Er, excuse me for saying so, and I apologise for it ahead of time. My sincerest apologies to the memory of Jack Kemp. I respect him and wish there were more like him. This apology does not accrue to Dich Cheney, however.
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All you need is five fingers to Jack a Dick.
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4
By the way, I wasn't insinuating that Jack Kemp represented the modern warp of his party. He was more of a pre-Gingrich traditional conservative and didn't deserve to see his party co-opted by ideological knuckle-draggers.
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5
Funny that you cite Kemp and Dole as polar opposites. I guess it was true in terms of attitude, but I think of both as being motivated by principle rather than the petty resentments that drive what remains of the Republican party. I know Dole was perfectly capable of some disgraceful behavior, but I also remember how he would go out of his way to say, in '96, that Clinton was his opponent, not his enemy--and there were, IIRC, scattered boos when he said it, foreshadowing the McCain-Palin howler monkeys that now dominate the party. For all his one-time talk about "Democrat Wars" and other gutter politics, I don't think Dole would have ever stooped as low as McCain did last year, or the Republicans are doing now.
A strange kind of cosmic irony in Kemp passing as Specter leaves the party, Gingrich is (somewhat) reascendant, Jeff Sessions, who makes Tom Delay look like a statesman, takes over the GOP side of the judiciary, Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint... -
6
"But his essential optimism blinded him to the limits of his ideology; he actually believed that tax cuts would always generate more revenue."
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Please tell us why such basic, unapologetic irrationality and inability to grasp the most basic consequences of important public policies doesn't automatically disqualify someone for high government office. Being an optimist doesn't make you insane. -
7
One of the things I liked about Kemp was that he recognized that conservative principles (as stated) could be applied in ways that would help the poor. For example, he advocated turning over public housing to the current occupants. It's hard to see a downside to doing so.
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Doing it well would require creating some infrastructure for building management. But it could be done, and it would have improved opportunities for many people. -
8
I had no feelings one way or another about Jack Kemp. He led a charmed life. I am as sorry for his passing as I am any.
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But the line about what the repub party needs causes me to comment. The repubs are what they are. And Cheney is one of their heros. -
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[...] sure I won’t be able to find them all. Here’s two more, Peter Wehner at Commentary and Joe Klein at [...]
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