What Happened to Jack Kemp?
Caldwell, Christopher
What Happened to Jack Kemp? By Christopher Caldwell Four days after O.J. Simpson's acquittal, Jack Kemp went on Meet the Press and talked about the delirious joy with which certain blacks greeted...
...Lately the Speaker, at Kemp's urging, has been pushing to turn D.C...
...He has backed off, and Powell is now "all he talks about," according to one Empower associate...
...To him, the villains are all on the right," says one of Kemp's oldest congressional allies...
...He has been largely silent on the Contract with America...
...That program retards precisely the things that Kemp professes to hold most precious: entrepreneurial initiative, job creation, free association...
...Kemp did little to stem a corrupt HUD bureaucracy, and left having presided over a budget expansion from $19.7 billion to $28.1 billion...
...When the Prison Fellowship, a Christian missionary group led by Charles Colson, held a Maryland retreat in June, Kemp-whose wife Joanne sits on the board-went along as a spouse...
...That troubles a middle-class electorate that has not yet given supply-side economics a full-throated endorsement...
...I was the only Republican to go public against the White House, the IMF, and Yale University [on the Mexico bailout], and I did not get a single line...
...He still begins speeches, "My fellow revolutionaries . . . ." But there is an increasing agreement among Republicans that he is failing to hear an important voice in that revolution-his own...
...Kemp's people also hoped it would foster a friendship between Kemp and Dole, who have never been close...
...Kemp set up another Gingrich meeting on June 7, this time with Bob Dole and incoming Howard University president H. Patrick Swygert...
...If Republicans are saying little specifically to black voters, it may be because they have absorbed Kemp's message that the poor and the black are no different than anybody else, and don't need special appeals...
...Pete Wilson's campaign...
...Now that there's no campaign, staffers have fled in droves, and the organization is deep in debt- to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, by one account...
...into a Hong Kong-style enterprise zone with no capital-gains taxes and an exemption from federal income taxes...
...Kemp's friends say that on more than one occasion, he has expressed concern that the "Republican party is moving too far to the right...
...With Dole keeping him at arm's length, Kemp has been seeking a role in the presidential campaigns of Steve Forbes and (maybe) Colin Powell...
...Only a sense of 'What the hell is Jack doing?' Dole gets upset about that kind of lack of discipline...
...Two years ago, during an after-dinner panel at a Chicago fundraiser for Kemp's think-tank Empower America, a relative of Blockbuster Video mogul Wayne Huizenga asked Kemp a question about "protecting our borders" from immigration...
...That's a bigger problem for Kemp than it would be for other politicians...
...Kemp has always been concerned about the downtrodden, and optimistic about governmental solutions...
...Even the liberal Nicholas Lemann saw Kemp as "reliving with an almost eerie exactitude the early machinations that preceded the War on Poverty...
...Kemp and Gingrich are particularly close-Newt got choked up during a toast at Kemp's 60th birthday party in July-and Kemp's role in shaping Gingrich's agenda is large...
...I wouldn't look for an intellectual defense of this position from Kemp-or Gingrich for that matter," says a Republican politician who knows both well...
...One participant remembers that Kemp "wasn't listening to anybody and went on for 45 minutes...
...Clint Bolick thinks Kemp has made real inroads...
...I spend 95 percent of my speeches beating the left to death on socialism, health care, taxes, devaluation of the frickin' peso...
...Howard, a D.C.-based black university on whose board Kemp sits, had been receiving $196 million in federal subsidies, which the House Budget Committee called for zeroing out over seven years...
...So he is using Empower America, the organization he co-founded with William J. Bennett, as his platform on these issues, a platform that may be less permanent than thought...
...According to a former staffer for one of the Amigos, Kemp asked House Majority Leader Dick Armey last summer to float the idea of a Kemp appointment as Treasury secretary in a Dole administration...
...Once a unifying force in the Republican party, Kemp has begun to vex the more aggressive pursuers of the Contract with America, and even many in the political center, largely over race...
...But because of the way he has worked since he went to HUD, he hasn't rigorously addressed any issues in seven years...
...And Kemp in no small measure made the people who made the Contract with America...
...Kemp has always been a Republican with a difference on racial attitudes, but over the last three years he has turned up the rhetorical volume, issuing dark warnings about the persistence of racism, the dangers of dismantling social programs, and so on and on...
...Dan Coats-have met for dinner almost every month to discuss personal and political issues...
...Every Republican you talk to has at least one story of Kemp's contrariness...
...According to columnist Robert D. Novak, both Kemp and his old comrade-inarms ex-Wisconsin Sen...
...Kemp's willingness to live with affirmative action is particularly suspect...
...Meanwhile, Kemp is keeping himself in the public eye through the 14-member National Commission on Economic Growth and Tax Reform that he chairs...
...It was when he took over HUD in 1989 that Kemp's idealism-particularly on race and poverty issues-began to set him adrift from conservative politics...
...His difficulties with the tax commission and with small-government conservatives may be due to the successes of his pro-growth tax policies, which have freed conservatives finally to launch a frontal assault on spending...
...This was supposed to be Kemp's moment...
...Hui-zen-ga...
...His constituent profile can, fairly or unfairly, be caricatured as elite financial interests, liberal journalists, and minorities...
...In 1994, with Republicans on the brink of a legislative takeover in California, he campaigned against the state's anti-immigrant Proposition 187- the centerpiece of Gov...
...Ed Goeas, who polled for Kemp in the 1988 campaign, says he has done no polling on him since he pulled out of the '96 race, but that his most recent numbers showed Kemp at a strikingly high 50 percent name-recognition among blacks...
...And he's right...
...For Kemp's realization in the late 70s that the deficit was a trick to trap would-be tax-cutters-and his gutsy insistence that taxes be cut all the same-was an intellectual triumph...
...And this is where, for Jack, rigorous thinking doesn't come in...
...Such an ambition could explain the anguished vacillations Kemp went through in the aftermath of the Sperling breakfast...
...mayoral primary in which Gingrich described Marion Barry as a "convicted felon" who'd offered "failed leadership," he seemed on a collision course with the returning mayor...
...Kemp's blast was poorly timed- just days before Dole was to introduce a Senate bill to abolish affirmative action at the federal level...
...Simpson's acquittal, Jack Kemp went on Meet the Press and talked about the delirious joy with which certain blacks greeted the verdict...
...lawyer Johnnie Cochran a lengthy standing ovation that night...
...Since 1980, he has consistently been the favored presidential nominee of Republican activists...
...He called me because I'd played it straight with the city when we tried to convert some public housing," Kemp says proudly...
...A middle class, furthermore, increasingly mindful that oratorical tenderness in racial politics has always led to waste, graft, and blight, not to mention a justice system severely damaged by the O.J...
...Kemp likes to tell stories about campaigning in union halls in the district he represented for 18 years in Congress...
...Kemp is not yet in danger of becoming a renegade Republican crank, along the lines of Harold Stassen or John Anderson...
...Kemp experimented with a number of "empowerment" programs, all of which began with supply-side ideas and wound up with gargantuan price tags...
...Kemp reveals that the plan is Barry's...
...As late as May 1994 Kemp was warning that Republicans would "never be a majority again" unless they courted minorities...
...Now that doesn't sound like the name of someone who came over on the Mayflower...
...He also began "building bridges" to blacks- specifically to the black far left that cares about housing issues...
...Jack is ripping mad that he campaigned in 150 races last year and didn't really get much credit," says one former staffer...
...In September, he was one of the few white Republicans to attend (as the guest of Rangel) the annual soir?e of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has been conspicuously inhospitable to his fellow Republican Gary Franks, and which gave O.J...
...but in fact, especially after redistricting in the early 80s, the New York 31st was solidly Republican and suburban, and Kemp's conservative Republican successor, Bill Paxon, won safely in it once Kemp had left...
...If '96 is run on dividing races," he said, "I will not participate in that...
...Fear of fundraising surely is part of the story...
...Kemp has been in touch with Powell through his friend and Powell's chief adviser Ken Duberstein...
...This was high apostasy, and Kemp threatened to disassociate himself from any campaign that followed a contrary agenda...
...Nonetheless, Kemp has drifted far from Republican voters on a couple of important issues...
...He talked about his issues...
...When Jack was in the public arena," says a staffer for one of the Amigos, "he was as rigorous as any congressman I've ever been around...
...Howard's funding, unlike affirmative action, isn't a front-line conservative issue, and Kemp may be right to protect Republicans from accusations of spite and vengefulness...
...Trent Lott and Connie Mack, former Rep...
...He raised $2.6 million for his congressional campaigns in both 1984 and 1986, and $16.7 million for his presidential run in 1988...
...Radio talk-show host Armstrong Williams would not even speak about it for this article, saying, "Personally I think the world of Jack Kemp, but our politics are just too far apart...
...But did he talk about the Contract...
...He figured a campaign would put him in a series of ongoing arguments with conservatives...
...Among his friends and political allies, Kemp has always been first among equals...
...Gingrich intervened to stop the cuts- on the same day, coincidentally, that Standard and Poor's, following suit from Moody's, downgraded Howard's bonds...
...Open immigration was a dogma of the economic-freedom right for much of the 1980s-even if Kemp had taken it to an extreme as Bush's housing secretary, banning immigration inspectors from entering public-housing projects to search for undocumented workers...
...David Frum subjected the most ambitious of these-tenant ownership-to a withering attack in his book Dead Right, noting that privatizing a public housing unit cost $130,000, more than the price of building a unit and giving it away...
...Self-described Kempian civil rights lawyer Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice wrote Kemp an angry letter calling the Sperling incident "appalling and profoundly disappointing...
...I am convinced," said Kemp, "that a lot of the black experience, and a lot of black people, cheered for the reason that...
...But Kemp was troubled by something else: finding himself at odds with his fellow Republicans...
...But just as he lacks a voice without a presidential candidacy, he lacks an identity without a coherent body of doctrine...
...Race alone should not be the criterion," Kemp said, "but race could be considered as you try to broaden the base of economic opportunities...
...The Conservative Opportunity Society, Newt Gingrich's main rhetorical vehicle before his election as minority whip in 1989, was founded on consciously Kempite lines...
...After last year's D.C...
...Putting the plan in a racial context, Kemp told a journalist, "Home rule is a civil-rights issue for the 90s, with the same appeal as South Africa in the years of apartheid...
...Memorable was Democratic party activist Kimi Gray, the autocratic den mother of Washington's Kenilworth-Parkside housing project, whom Kemp described as "my hero...
...This year he asked a left-wing Latino activist in the Alazan-apache housing project in San Antonio whether Kemp could get any votes there...
...Aside from a capital-gains tax cut, the Contract was dedicated to small-government reforms that Kemp has traditionally ignored, even opposed...
...If you asked him, 'Who's better on these issues: Charlie Rangel or Pat Buchanan?' he'd say, 'Charlie's better.' And that's why he didn't run for president...
...It was after one such meeting in January that Kemp decided to pull out of the '96 campaign...
...But it remains an unlikely backwater for the onetime heir to Reagan to be lingering in...
...Such continuing loyalty is not unusual for Kemp veterans...
...His issues are increasingly race and poverty...
...You can't raise race without raising big government...
...He's in the process of marginalizing himself," says a longtime supply-side ally, and it may not be too early to ask the question of Jack Kemp that Ronald Reagan asked himself about the Democrats: Is he leaving the Republican party or is the Republican party leaving him...
...Kemp has said in foundation circles that Empower will be dissolved after next year's Republican convention...
...At a July breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor's Godfrey Sperling, Kemp attacked the decision of the University of California regents to eliminate programs that discriminated by race, saying that he would have voted to continue the practice...
...Yet he claims he's misunderstood by those who see him veering left...
...There's no pragmatic explanation for Kemp's interest in race, either: His district was 1 percent black...
...The first model-a two-rate flat tax that might soften the hit on the middle class-proved "disappointing," according to a Dole campaign aide, but whatever the details, the existence of a parallel tax track within the Dole campaign is hardly a ringing endorsement...
...As the afternoon's proceedings drew to a close, Kemp rose from the audience to inveigh against cooperating with Republican efforts to end affirmative action...
...For the past 10 years, a small group of legislators, called "The Amigos"-Kemp, Gingrich, Sens...
...The tax commission was dreamed up by economist Jeffrey Bell, who first urged a Kemp presidential run in the late 70s, and financial consultant David Smick, a former Kemp chief of staff, as a means of keeping Kemp relevant...
...Robert Kasten are seeking to "convert" Powell to supply-side economics...
...Howard Husock, a housing expert at Harvard's Kennedy School with strong sympathies for Kemp, described the program as "lemon capitalism": private bailouts for public failures...
...In his increasing marginalization, Kemp may be merely a victim of his successes...
...asked whether he would run if drafted, he replies, "Of course...
...Kemp's discomfort with the GOP of the 1990s has led him on at least two occasions into active political opposition...
...Says Bolick, "The guy told me, 'If Kemp were running for president, he would carry Alazanapache.'" But Kemp isn't running for president...
...When I criticized the Republicans for supporting the deal, that's when I got press...
...That, of course, was no sin against Reaganite conservatism...
...Kemp told the 1988 Republican convention that "if we do our job right, I predict that by 1992-the start of George Bush's second term-one-quarter of our party will consist of black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans...
...Meanwhile, Dole staffers are working privately on their own tax plan, to be unveiled in the general election...
...There was no anger," said a Dole staffer, who notes that former Kempites on staff, including campaign head Scott Reed, are more than capable of explaining Kemp's ways to Dole...
...At a private meeting in Phoenix last winter, Kemp promised Forbes, who backs a flat tax similar to Armey's, that he'd endorse him...
...Even as he hitches his wagon to these unorthodox candidacies, Kemp nonetheless retains the ear of the new generation of orthodox Republican leaders...
...Affirmative action, a core Republican issue, is a different matter...
...Republicans took only 12 percent of the black vote in their sweep to victory...
...That does not mean that Kemp's cross-racial appeals have not been an asset to the party-or at least to him personally...
...It's no secret," Kemp told a reporter in January, "that Jack Kemp will depart from the budget and Contract with America if it doesn't include a dramatic change in the inner-city investment climate...
...this overturns 100 years of the lynch law, albeit no one can possibly excuse and not feel incredible sorrow for the loss of Nicole and Ron Goldman...
...Vin Weber, sometimes House majority leader Dick Armey, and (infrequently) Sen...
...When it was founded in 1993, most looked on it as the nucleus of a Kemp presidential campaign...
...Kemp roared...
...One of the things that has made him so different-and appealing-as a politician is that these biases are wholly idealistic and have no pragmatic or Machiavellian basis...
...There is no quid pro quo, and no promise," a Kemp friend confirms, "but it has been talked about...
...Duberstein has reportedly sought Kemp's advice on how the pro-choice Powell could finesse the abortion issue with the religious right...
...With Republicans in power, Kemp has gone from Happy Warrior to Reluctant one...
...A 1992 convention poll showed Kemp at almost 40 percent, with no one else out of single digits...
...While claiming to have been misquoted, Kemp called immediately after the breakfast, told Dole what had happened, and stopped by later in the day...
...Kemp attributes the decision to an impatience with fundraising, but the rap on Kemp in some activist circles-that he raises money and thanks donors poorly-is unfounded...
...affair...
Vol. 1 • October 1995 • No. 7
