Kemp Evoked Era And Spirit Of Reagan's Rise

I first met Jack Kemp 30 years ago in an oak-paneled room of the Wisconsin Club, a private venue for businessmen in downtown Milwaukee. He was there to address a luncheon meeting of the Pachyderm Club, obviously a Republican gathering, and I was there as a cub reporter for The Milwaukee Journal.

Kemp held forth for the better part of an hour on something he called "supply-side economics." The audience of traditional, Midwestern conservatives looked skeptical.

They were fine with Kemp's drive to cut taxes, especially the taxes investors pay on capital gains and dividends. They had no problem with the notion that these tax cuts would unleash freshets of capital and refresh economic growth.

But when Kemp talked about cutting the income tax rate by 10 percent each year for three years, some in the room asked how federal spending could be cut commensurately. Kemp said that didn't matter; deficits would not be a problem and growth would restore the budget to balance in time.

This last proposition did not sit so well with the Pachyderms, who began to drift away after getting their coffee. When the congressman paused for breath, I asked whether his deep tax cut and deficit owed something to the stimulative strategies John Maynard Keynes pushed during the Great Depression. Kemp's eyes got wide. "No, no it's not Keynes," he said, his face contorted in horror. "Stick around; I want to talk to you."

And so I stuck around to confront the persona of Jack Kemp. Having grown up in an American Football League town, I knew him as the charismatic quarterback who led the Buffalo Bills to two AFL titles in the 1960s. I knew he had moved on to politics, working for Gov. Ronald Reagan in California and then winning a seat in Congress in a Buffalo district. By the late 1970s, while still in his early 40s, Kemp was being promoted as a national figure, a good-looking ex-jock who liked to talk about ideas.

And did he ever. Once all the club members and other guests had disappeared, the congressman opened up his briefcase and poured out his program with all the passion he once brought to football. He waxed rhapsodic about the "Laffer curve," then regarded as a crackpot notion from a rather obscure academic. It purported to predict how lower tax rates would improve federal tax revenues and wipe out the budget deficit.

Of course, Arthur Laffer and his curve were to become much better known in 1981, when Reagan moved from California to Washington as president and pushed a modified version of the Kemp tax cut through Congress in his first months in office.

The early 1980s were a good time to be Jack Kemp. A new generation of like-minded youthful conservatives had begun to arrive and rise in the chamber — including Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, David Stockman and Dick Cheney.

But more important to Kemp was the rise of his ideas. The Reagan program looked radical at first, and the country took a while to climb out of the worst recession it had seen since the Great Depression. But when the economy turned up, Reagan's stock rose dramatically — and Kemp's did likewise.

He was a prophet of the positive. The GOP had to talk about expanding wealth and giving people a chance to do better. It had to stop being "the party of root canal," stop carping about the federal debt and deficits because those issues mattered only to those who would be voting Republican in any case. Kemp was all about reaching out to people who had never voted Republican, or at least not in decades.

Kemp moved the ball a long way for his party, and he got a fair share of attention for it. But he never got to wield much of the power his party won. He served nine terms in the House with his party mired deep in the minority, giving up his seat to run for president in 1988. That presidential campaign never quite got off the ground, and Kemp quit the race before the end of March.

The man elected president that year, George H.W. Bush, gave his former rival a Cabinet job as secretary of housing and urban development. It was a chance for Kemp to try out some of his ideas, such as "urban enterprise zones." Kemp stuck it out as a team player, but it was far from the role he had been preparing for all his life.

When the first Bush administration ended in 1993, Kemp headed for the private sector. The following year, he watched from the sidelines as one of his junior colleagues from his House days, Newt Gingrich, led a successful assault on Capitol Hill and became the first Republican speaker in 40 years.

In the summer and fall of 1996, Kemp had one last hurrah as the Republican candidate for vice president. He and top-of-the-ticket partner Bob Dole had never been close, and the strain showed at times during their losing campaign. Kemp had often said the one position he cared to play on a football team was quarterback, and it showed.

Kemp declined to mount another presidential bid of his own in 2000 and did not join the new Republican administration organized that year by the second President Bush. He had not been in the public eye often in recent years. His story always seemed unfinished, his potential unfulfilled.

So it was sad this weekend to learn of his death, to reflect on what he brought to the party and the Congress, and to mourn what has been lost since he left the national political stage. He embodied much of the spirit that lifted Reagan at his zenith, including Reagan's ability to make conservative economics appealing to the working class.

Kemp never figured out how to finesse the conflict between his party's economic and social agendas. He preferred to focus on the essentially egalitarian notion that any and all individuals should be allowed to go as far as their talent and work would take them. He was the original big-tent Republican, all about outreach and welcome, as eager to expand the party as he was to expand the economy.

He always had the sunny, eternally upbeat manner so many saw in Reagan in the White House. With Kemp's passing, those days suddenly seem distant indeed.