This week we lost Jack Kemp, one of the former stars of the conservative movement.
I followed Kemp’s career right from the beginning as a subscriber to HUMAN EVENTS, which back in the 1960s and early 1970s, when HE was the ONLY source for reliable news about conservative politics.
Anyway, one of the features of HE was one called “Races of the Week” which profiled, beginning several months prior to each election, three U.S. Senate or House contests each week in which a strong conservative might have a shot at winning. In 1970, one of these was the race for the 39th** Congressional District in New York, where a former NFL quarterback Jack French Kemp was running for the seat of Democrat Richard McCarthy, who was giving up the position to run for the U.S. Senate.
Now, I am not a fan of football or for that matter of any spectator sport. (I sometimes tell people that the only thing I know about football is that the number on the jerseys represent the IQs of the individual players.) Still, if HE liked him that was good enough for him and I was pleased when he won his race that November, one of the few Republicans, in a not very good year for the Grand Old Party, to take over a seat that had been held by the Democrats.
My admiration for Kemp grew over the years as he became one of the stars of the conservative wing of the House GOP. It peaked when he became one of the two sponsors of the Kemp-Roth tax cut bill.
It’s hard to realize today, after tax cuts have become a Republican staple campaign issue.
But back in 1978, the idea of cutting taxes was a real novelty. (In one of his parody songs “You Need An Analyst,” Allen Sherman included a line saying that anyone who thought that they would ever cut the income tax being one of those who needed the service of a psychiatric professional)
And actually, Republicans would have been thought to be the last ones to put forward such an idea. The GOP had the reputation of being the ones who were always kvetching about the ever-growing federal deficit and debt. Why, with the federal budget so awash in red ink, a reduction in the amount of revenue would have been irresponsible. To reduce the deficit, you need to cut spending, not taxes! Or so the party of that day would have argued.
But Jack Kemp (and the conservative Republican Senator from the state where I grew up, Bill Roth of Delaware) had read their economic history and the work of the economist Arthur Laffer and had discovered that the one recent time when income tax rates had been cut—by a Democratic, John F. Kennedy—who had reduced the ridiculously punitive confiscatory tax rates on upper income taxpayers imposed under FDR’s New Deal, tax revenues had not declined, but increased, as wealthy taxpayers had less incentive to find tax shelters and other dodges to shield their earnings from 90% tax surcharges. (As Bing Crosby once said when he was subject to the old soak-the rich tax rates, “I sing all week to make a living and the government lets me keep what I earn on Sunday evening.)
Kemp and Roth also realized that it was a lot more politically popular to offer to give voters some of their money back than to propose to eliminate ANY government programs. Because face it, every form of government spending, no matter how useless it is to anyone else, benefits those who get the money. Propose to eliminate one taxpayer-funded program and you make enemies of its supporters. Propose to eliminate a score of programs and you create a score of enemies who ally together to fight to the death oppose you for their mutual benefit. No wonder Ronald Reagan once referred to a government program as the nearest thing to eternal life as we will see in this sad vale of tears.
But everyone, or at least everyone who makes a decent income, pays taxes. Propose to reduce the amount everyone pays and you make friends of every taxpayer.
So the Kemp-Roth proposal, to reduce individual income tax rates by 30, over three years (later reduced to 25%) was introduced in Congress, eventually embraced by Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan and was a major factor in Republican victories at the polls in both 1978 and 1980. It finally became the law of the land in 1981 after the Gipper was in the White House and the GOP was in actual control of the U.S. Senate and a Republican-Dixiecrat coalition in control of the House of Representatives.***
Aside from the Kemp-Roth proposal, Kemp was also one of the first Republicans, along again with Ronald Reagan, to put a smiling face on the visage of the GOP. Before then, the Republicans were seen as the tight-lipped scowling schoolmarm, every ready to rap her naughty children over the knuckles for the slightest infraction and certain everything was going to hell in a handbasket. The Democrats were able to pose as the lovable roguish uncle, generous, optimistic and tolerant. No wonder their party had kept control of both houses of Congress for more than a quarter century.
Kemp and Reagan helped turn this around. Reagan preached the doctrine that our country had been great, was still great and that its greatest days were still before it. Kemp worked with black Democratic politicians in Congress to pass programs to enable urban slum dwellers to become homeowners, instead of tossing their weekly paychecks down the rathole of rent payments for miserable sets of rooms. A hand up, not a hand out.
When the GOP convention convened in Detroit, Michigan in July 1980 to make official Reagan’s nomination for President, many of his supporters, including myself, hoped that the former governor of California would choose Kemp as his running mate.
There was even a draft Kemp movement at the convention with neat black and white “Reagan-Kemp” buttons. I had a couple of these but foolishly gave them all away to admirers, hoping to build support for cause, and erroneously believing I could just get more from headquarters.
I even attended a rally at the convention for the Veep for Kemp cause with speakers like then Congressman Trent Lott of Mississippi, later the Republican Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate.
But it was not to be. It could have been worse, I suppose, we apparently only narrowly avoided the sure disaster of a Reagan-Jerry Ford “co-Presidency,” but Ron apparently bought the argument that the GOP moderates needed to be placated and chose instead George H.W. Bush, a gray shadow of a man whose only outstanding characteristic was the length of his resume.
So Jack Kemp remained in the House of Representatives when Reagan became President. He played his part in the passage of the Kemp-Roth tax cut, but never having sought a House leadership post, he largely remained in the background during the years of the Reagan Presidency.
Some, including myself, wondered why, if Kemp was apparently not interested in a long-term House career, evidenced by this failure to seek a leadership position (as a Republican during the time when its minority in the House still seemed permanent, a committee Chairmanship appeared out of the question) he did not seek higher elective office.
Some had touted him for the Presidency as early as 1980, but once Reagan had decided to run despite quibbles by commentators that he was “too old,”**** this was out of the question. However, there were opportunities in both New York State Senate and Governor’s races. In the same year that Reagan won, Alphonse D’Amato, a Long Island local government official, defeated liberal GOP Senator Jacob Javits in the Republican primary and then won the seat in the fall when the left-wing vote was split when Javits insisted on continuing to run on the Liberal Party line. Two years later, in a bad year for Republicans, businessman outsider Lewis Lehrman nearly beat Mario Cuomo in the New York governor’s race. It is hard to believe that Kemp couldn’t have done as well or better as either or both of these little-known candidates in these races.
Who knows why Kemp failed to run in these races. Perhaps he didn’t wish to take the risk of failure and the loss of his House seat. More likely, is that having already played in the big leagues of national politics with the Kemp-Roth tax cut effort, he felt he should only shoot for the top and make a bid for the White House itself when the chance came.
In 1988, the chance came. Unfortunately, it couldn’t have come under worse circumstances. Jack entered the race with all sorts of disadvantages. First, although he was well known within the GOP and the conservative movement, as a mere congressman, he was almost unknown to the general public. Second, while he had every reason to consider himself the true ideological heir to President Reagan, to the public the logical successor seemed to be the man who had been next in line to the Presidency for the previous eight years, George H.W. Bush.
In addition, the party, after eight years in power, had a plethora of at least plausible and in some cases, actually attractive candidates in addition to Bush and Kemp, such as former Delaware governor Pete DuPont and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. The Religious Right, which had played a big role in Reagan’s initial election had come up with a candidate of its own, who was not merely supported by but was a part of that movement, CBN television minister Pat Robertson.
In such a crowd, it was difficult for Kemp to stand out as the alternative to Bush and to many of his supporters, including myself, it seemed he was not making a serious effort. Admittedly, he was hamstrung by being reluctant to make any criticism of Ronald Reagan’s administration both for fear of alienating conservatives and because of Jack’s relentlessly positive campaign themes, but when the race came down to a contest as to who was the Gipper’s most faithful supporter, Reagan’s Veep was always going to win hands down.
Eventually, the Kemp forces conceded that they had no chance to win any of the early primaries and pinned their hopes on surprise wins in the Georgia and Minnesota caucuses. When they were unable to win either, that was the end of the Kemp presidential effort, not only for 1988, but for the rest of Jack’s life.
By 1988, I was living in the Washington, D.C. area and was present on Capitol Hill for Kemp’s official announcement of his candidacy and later briefly worked for the Kemp fundraising effort as a data entry peon, logging in campaign contributions. (I once played a harmless joke for a wealthier friend of mine and adjusted the form fundraising letters he regularly received from the campaign so that Jack would address him by his college nickname.)
Also, I met Kemp in person at a reception for his volunteers at his home*** in Chevy Chase, Maryland for the first and last time. He couldn’t have been a nicer guy and I mourned later when his candidacy crashed and burned.
Again, in 1988, there was the hope that Bush might make Kemp his running mate and give him the chance to be in line for the next Presidential nomination. But Bush, while he may have been a mediocre President, was no slouch as a politician. He picked the suitably right-wing but harmless Dan Quayle to be his Veep and made Kemp his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Why? One reason, you can fire a HUD Secretary, but not a Vice President. Bush brought both Kemp and former Drug Czar Bill Bennett (as Education Secretary) into his cabinet. George H.W. knew that Jack and Bennett were the only two figures in the GOP who would have plausibly challenged him for the 1992 nomination and that by making them part of his Administration they would both be held responsible for any of its failures. Bush also knew that both men were sufficiently honorable not oppose his renomination in any case once they had accepted office under him.
Probably you can’t remember any of Kemp’s great accomplishments as HUD Secretary. Neither can I. If there were any, they have been forgotten with the other failures of that one-term Presidency.
Finally, in 1996, there was one last chance for Kemp to take his place on the national stage when Dole unexpectedly asked the former congressman to serve as his vice Presidential running mate in his inept effort to unseat Bill Clinton.******
Former Kemp for President supporters like myself felt a burst of optimism at the news. Could this be the bold move that would restore the White House to the GOP and revive Jack’s stagnant career? But those hopes died in the first minutes of the Vice Presidential debate when Kemp, in effect, rolled over on his back and presented Vice President Gore his belly, when he announced that he would refuse to make any “personal” attacks on the most corrupt Administration in American history. Once again, we learned that it is possible to be “too nice” in politics.
Admittedly, as the scowling, sarcastic humorless Bob Dole (who apparently believed that the best response to having a joke bomb was to repeat it–often) was undoubtedly the worst GOP nominee since Alf Landon it would probably have made little difference if Kemp had managed to be the kind of GOP attack dog the party needed that year.
After that little was heard about or from Kemp except that he had adopted the career of choice of failed politicians and become a lobbyist, even taking on as a client the reprehensible left-wing dictator of Venezeula, Hugo Chavez. Finally, we heard the sad news this month that he had succumbed to the Big C.
So, we can remember Jack Kemp as a man who played a pivotal role in our nation’s history at a crucial moment for the benefit of us all. And if he did not live up to the promise many held for him, that can be said of many of us (including yours truly.) Honor him for his virtues, try to overlook his faults.
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*(Yes, there was NATIONAL REVIEW, but its emphasis was almost entirely on issues and political philosophy. Except for a roundup of political races in the final issue before an election, NR provided almost no news on individual election races and candidates. You kind of got the feeling that the otherwise admirable WFB, Jr. looked down from his ivory tower and found the sordid details of such plebian contests far too dirty and yucky for his high-toned magazine to concern itself with. Since the Old Man gave up active control of the magazine, this changed somewhat.)
**How things have changed! Now, the state of New York doesn’t even have anywhere close to 39 total congressional districts as its high tax/high corruption series of governments over the past decades has driven more and more of its residents to take up residence in warmer and more business-friendly climes.
***As Jerry Taylor of NRO has pointed out, the Republican success on tax cuts did have unintended consequences farther down the line. It wrongly convinced too many in the party that it was never necessary to cut government spending and led inevitably to the creation of the big government or “compassionate” conservative movement, with the results that have been seen in the November 2008 election.
****Funny how there were no objections by these same types to the candidacies of 1996 and 2008 GOP Presidential nominees Bob Dole and John McCain, both older than Reagan was at the time. In my belief, it was because in the former case, Dole was rightly seen by these journalists as a far weaker Republican candidate than was Reagan and in the latter, because McCain was both weaker and more closely aligned with the commentator’s ideological outlook.
*****Yes, this was his home in fact from the time he entered Congress and NOT Buffalo, New York. I had the privilege of talking to one of his attractive and charming young daughters at the reception and I remember her guilelessly admitting to me that she had not been back to Buffalo, even for a visit, for many years. This phenomenon, of members of Congress representing but no longer having themselves or even their families, still living in their home states or districts is, IMHO, a cause of many of the problems with our national legislature today. But I will quickly add, that if Kemp was guilty of this fault, he was far from alone in the House and did not lack fellows from both parties and all across the ideological spectrum.
******Dole’s first choice had been none other than Bill Bennett, who sensibly declined, realizing that his then unknown to the public gambling addiction would doom the already slender chances of the ticket if it had been revealed.
