Jimmy Kemp sounds a whole lot like his eloquent father, the late Republican official and idea man Jack Kemp, and this is a very good thing. The U.S. political world needs to start rehearing the Kempian message.
Fortunately, they can watch tonight via Facebook starting at 7:25 p.m. EST as the Jack Kemp Foundation holds its 10th anniversary dinner, where Kempian themes, of course, will get necessary airing. For a fuller, unvarnished dive into those themes, though, I interviewed Kemp. I am convinced the public would respond well to his vision if only political leaders would promulgate them with energy and focus.
“This political philosophy of the American idea is predicated on the importance of family and the power of the personal,” Kemp told me. “People don’t want to know how much you know until they know how much you care. But … government can’t love. People love. In a free society, it is that civil society and our civic associations that provide for people in the community while freedom and free enterprise does its magic to create jobs and new opportunities.”
The goal of the Jack Kemp Foundation, he said, is to “build a network of people who care about other people, in order to get people to care about the policies in which we believe.” And, later in the interview, “The first thing about politics is that politics is not first. People are first. Policy matters and politics is a mean to an end, but you cannot elevate politics everything else. People come first, and then principles need to be understood. Policy comes from that. Politics is important, but it can’t overwhelm those other things.”
Even back in 1996, Kemp said, when his father was the Republican vice presidential nominee, his father already had begun worrying that “the Republican Party had moved away from his vision of the ‘American idea,’ the vision of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. … Yes, you have to win elections, but the way to do it is, yes, you had to be a populist — but not with anger. His frustration with the Republican Party was that it tapped into the anger of people as opposed to the possibility and potential of our citizens.”
These all may sound like mere gauzy, aspirational ideals, but the Jack Kemp Foundation already has had some success in putting them into practice. Working with Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and others, the foundation played a large role in developing the proposal for “opportunity zones” — what Kemp called “the policy grandchild of my father’s ‘enterprise zones’” — that were included in the 2017 tax cut and reform package signed into law by President Trump.
Kemp and his foundation are working with a network of other leaders and groups to develop and push new policy ideas — especially those that promote better civic education of founding principles and those that “identify and train and invests in women and minority ‘social impact conservatives’ who are interested in public service.” Among those are Scott’s Empower America Project, Republican Texas Rep. Will Hurd’s Future Leaders Fund, and the America 101 initiative that has done some work with Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse, along with long-standing conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.
As Jack Kemp always did, Jimmy Kemp draws on timeless principles but always to push forward:
Here’s looking forward to the Jack Kemp Foundation’s next 10 years and beyond.
Correction: A previous version of the article referred to “Sen. Ben Sasse’s America 101 initiative.” The America 101 initiative is not run by Sasse but has done some work with him. The Washington Examiner apologizes for the error.
