After a brief intermission, we now return to our coverage of the co- dependent relationship between Jack Kemp and supply-sider Jude Wanniski. In an October 11 memo, Wanniski applauded the debate performances of Bob Dole in Hartford and Kemp in St. Petersburg. “The instant polls taken after both debates indicated Clinton and Gore were the easy winners, and if I were scoring according to Oxford standards I would agree,” Wanniski wrote. But ” this national conversation we are having about who will be in charge of the national family for the next four years is not about debating points.”
Now listen to Kemp echoing Wanniski the very next day on CNN’s Evans & Novak. “I lost the debate on debating points but won the debate on outlining Bob Dole’s vision of the future. . We’re not electing an Oxfordian debater.”
In the same memo, Wanniski praised Dole and Kemp because they “avoided the pleas of Republican intellectuals — from the Wall Street Journal and Bill Kristol’s Beltway Standard — that they take off the gloves and attack Clinton’s character.” Here’s echo #2: When Novak asked Kemp about our editorial last week, “Saving the GOP from Dole-Kemp ’96,” in which David Tell made the point that Dole and Kemp will have to shoulder much of the blame if the GOP loses the Congress, Kemp replied that “it’s the type of attack for which the Beltway Standard is getting known for in order to try to boost their circulation.”
Wait, it gets worse. We’ve written about the way in which Wanniski’s obsession with Louis Farrakhan has already had a deleterious influence on Kemp, who praised the Nation of Islam honcho in a Boston Globe interview last month. In his recent memo, Wanniski wrote: “In his speech in St. Louis, Farrakhan answered Kemp’s challenge to renounce anti-Semitism and bigotry once and for all as a prerequisite to national reconciliation with the Jewish community.” Yeah, sure: The only two people in the country who bought this, apparently, are Wanniski and — you guessed it — Kemp. Here’s what the VP candidate said on Evans & Novak: “I was pleased to see that statement. I would hope that there would be a response from the Jewish community.” Five days later, at a rally celebrating the one year anniversary of the Million Man March, Farrakhan blamed America for the “genocide” of Native Americans and blacks and added, “I see [Qaddafi] as a victim of America’s evil. I consider him a freedom fighter.”
Some of the Wanniski-Kemp stuff is just foolishness. Some is worse. This is worse. The Republican party’s candidate for the vice presidency has no business speaking friendly words about America’s most pernicious demagogue.
