A Democrat tells the story. Some time in the 1980s, there was a big GOP bash in D.C. The Democrat (a neighbor) watched the glittering elephants arrive, one of them being Jack Kemp, who, alone among the guests, stopped to chat up the cops on duty outside before going in. He did it with the manly bonhomie of an ex-jock and the ease of a born politician. Oh, no, thought the Democrat gloomily, another Republican with the common touch.
The other Republican the Kemp-watcher had in mind was Ronald Reagan, and the two men’s careers were intertwined. As a young congressman from the suburbs of Buffalo, Kemp was instrumental in converting Reagan to supply-side economics in the late 1970s. He backed Reagan in the 1980 election and backed his program to the hilt in the House — more strongly, sometimes, than Reagan himself. Many conservatives (including the editors of this magazine) saw him as Reagan’s heir.
Kemp was an autodidact. He focused on sports in his early life, becoming quarterback of the Buffalo Bills in the old AFL. Yet he nourished a nascent interest in politics by reading, reading, reading — WFB, Ayn Rand, economics, history. He honored ideas with the fervor of a young lover. His second passion, equal to his devotion to tax cuts, was his concern for black advancement. This was part conviction, part experience: As his friend Newt Gingrich liked to say, Jack had showered with people that most Republicans never meet. Kemp believed that the party of Lincoln had to regain its role as the champion of black America. The welfare state had not completed the civil-rights revolution; free-enterprise programs targeted at the inner city (such as enterprise zones) would do the trick instead.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ADVERTISEMENT
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Kemp never completed the touchdown drive of his career. When he sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, he was squeezed between Vice President George H.W. Bush and the Rev. Pat Robertson. Bush tapped Kemp to be his secretary of housing and urban development, where he served loyally even after Bush abandoned the tax-cutting gospel. When Bob Dole tapped Kemp to be his running mate in 1996, it came as a shock — Kemp already seemed emeritus — and indeed his campaign did the ticket no good and him little credit.
He had his flaws: a vein of pep-talk oratory that bled and bled; a tendency to pat himself on the back for his racial views (the wages of virtue can be as corrupting as the wages of sin); an indifference to the effects of 25 (and 35, and soon 45) years of unrestricted immigration, legal and illegal. But he was a bright and earnest man, and a great friend of NR — and did anyone else ever have his enthusiasm? Churchill said that being with FDR was like having a glass of champagne. Being with Jack Kemp was like chugging a can of Red Bull. How could someone so alive be gone? And yet it is so. R.I.P.
