Jack Kemp was, in the words of Hendrik Hertzberg of the liberal
flagship the New Republic, “a species of miracle I don’t
pretend to understand.”
Well, conservatives of my age understood Kemp very well, in the
very marrow of our bones, but even for us he seemed a species of
miracle. Nobody this side of Ronald Reagan ever inspired us so,
and nobody then alive (i.e., nobody short of James Madison) so
shaped our thinking. Nobody, not even Reagan himself, infused our
cause with such infectious energy as Kemp did. And nobody did
more to make clear that conservative ideals, if rightly
enunciated and understood, are aimed at serving not a narrow
slice of the public but the whole electorate, including the poor,
the black, the Hispanic, the day laborers, and the low-income
workers striving for a better life.
For years I kept a huge file labeled simply “Kemp” that moved
with me from job to job. It was filled with written copies of
Kemp’s speeches, articles about Kemp, list of policy proposals by
Kemp — and even a lengthy letter from me to Kemp in late
February of 1992, never mailed (political developments overtook
it before I actually sent it), outlining in great detail a
strategy for him to gently shove then-President GHW Bush aside
and wrest the Republican nomination from both Bush and challenger
Pat Buchanan. (Kemp rejected similar entreaties that year from
numerous people who actually had the political “stroke” to help
back it up.)
There was, of course, no similar “Dole” file or “Quayle” file or
“Lott” file or even a “Gingrich” file.
And I was far from alone in my enthusiasm. Young conservatives
from the late 1970s through the early 1990s had no doubt, none at
all, that Kemp was — philosophically and attitudinally —
Reagan’s obvious heir. It wasn’t just that Kemp (way back in the
fall of 1976) had been the first one to sell Reagan on
supply-side economics. It was that in his views on the Cold War,
on the sanctity of life, on the eradication of poverty, and of
America’s greatness and exceptionalism and unlimited future, Kemp
and Reagan were on the same page — and Kemp had an ability to
sell those views to communities that sometimes would not listen
to Reagan at all.
Sure, Reagan’s diaries showed that he felt Kemp could be a real
annoyance at times. And that was fine: Kemp could annoy almost
everybody. Even his public failings, and they were significant,
were the failings of a great man and a great spirit — somebody
too enthused about admirable ideals for his own good. He had a
need to be the center of attention. He had a nervous energy about
him that could be off-putting. He often spoke at too great a
length, turning meetings into his own personal filibusters. He
could get way too preachy and, especially after 1992, too apt to
insinuate that his listeners were less morally or philosophically
enlightened than he. When he was the Republican nominee for vice
president in 1996, for instance, he did his ticket no favors by
doing things like going into private, big-donor meetings at
Georgia country clubs and hectoring them about their collective
racial insensitivity or even outright racism.
But Kemp’s lack of discretion about causing needless offense also
manifested itself in a willingness to dare giving offense for
purposes both worthwhile and timely. At the 1992 Republican
National Convention in Houston, for example — the one
caricatured by the establishment media as being filled with fear
and hate — he had the almost impish gall to tell the assembled
delegates that history is “on the side of those liberal
democratic ideals which gave birth to our nation.” Of course,
conservative ideals are indeed “liberal” and (broadly speaking)
“democratic,” at least in the classical sense of the words. But
to use those words approvingly at a conservative Republican
convention was to risk being terribly misunderstood and even
unpopular. Only Kemp could get away with such a bold — and
appropriate — turn of phrase.
By that speech’s end, though, he was using “liberal” and
“Democrat” in their modern political senses: “My fellow
Americans, the liberal Democrats just don’t get it. They don’t
understand that you can’t create more employees without first
creating more employers, that you can’t have capitalism without
capital, and we can’t expect people to defend property rights
when they’re denied access to property.”
Good stuff, that.
In the same speech, he fought the dominant media narrative that
Soviet Communism just faded out of existence of its own accord.
“Communism didn’t fall,” Kemp insisted. “It was pushed. It was
our ideas that did the pushing.”
And that is what Jack Kemp was, more than anything else: a pusher
of ideas. Urban homesteading. Enterprise zones. Tenant management
of public housing. Capital gains tax cuts. Welfare reform based
on work incentives and incentives for families to stay together.
Housing tax credits. Escrow savings accounts. Housing vouchers
and portable rent subsidies. “Weed and Seed.” School choice.
Health savings accounts. Across-the-board tax cuts. Rollback of
Communism — including particular Kemp leadership against
Communists in Latin America. (Kemp once cleverly described his
and Reagan’s approach as “‘supply-side’ foreign policy: the
liberation of Grenada, the Strategic Defense Initiative and
support for the Contras in Nicaragua.”)
Mostly, though, Kemp was dedicated to creating more wealth not
due to love of lucre but for the right reasons. He was fond of
noting that free-market progenitor Adam Smith was a professor of
moral philosophy. And, in a 1985 speech in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, he explained what economics had to do with moral
concerns:
[Our] vision relies on free enterprise because of the
possibilities for fulfillment that it opens for ourselves and
our children. American has always been the one place on Earth
where you could climb as high or as far as your efforts and
God-given talent could take you. To be sure, this is not the
only aspect, or even the most important aspect, of life,
because man does not live by bread alone. But he does not live
without it. Material prosperity frees us to turn our
attention to higher things. Opportunity means more than
individual self-fulfillment: not just good work, but also good
works. Wages and the saving of wages are not just the means of
amassing personal comforts. They mean being able to meet your
obligations to our family, provide your children with hope for
a better life, and pass on the fullness of life to others. They
mean better homes — and better family life. Better schools —
and better education. Loving your neighborhood — and loving
your neighbor.
Jack Kemp, with his unmatched generosity of spirit, loved his
neighbors more thoroughly and palpably than almost any public
figure of recent generations. And he did it with a deep
[Presbyterian] faith in higher things. Saturday night, his family
put out this statement:
Jack Kemp passed away peacefully shortly after 6 o’clock this
evening, surrounded by the love of his family and pastor, and
believing with Isaiah, “My strength and my courage is the
Lord.”
For nearly 74 years, the Lord blessed us all with the life of
Jack Kemp — a man whose own strength and courage must have
pleased the Lord he loved.
