We’ve been trying to keep you up to date on the relationship between Jack Kemp and his longtime guru, Jude Wanniski, ever since Kemp’s selection as Bob Dole’s running mate. Two weeks ago, Kemp took Wanniski’s advice and praised Louis Farrakhan and the Million Man March. Now things are really getting weird. Is Wanniski against bombing Iraq? Well, then, it seems Jack will be too!
On October 1, Kemp spoke before a crowd of women in Tucson, a speech whose purpose was, according to a campaign spokesperson, to reach out to “soccer moms and . . . suburban women.” It seems what women really want is a president who acts in the national interest only after getting an international permission slip. “Mr. Kemp,” reported the New York Times, ” even attempted to cast foreign policy in . . . a feminine light, saying that a Dole Administration would apply the type of diplomacy that a mother would choose and not ‘bomb Baghdad without talking to someone’ . . .”
On the same day, Wanniski wrote a memo to former undersecretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz criticizing a Wolfowitz Wall Street Journal piece about the danger Saddam poses to U.S. interests. “He is no threat to his neighbors or to the region,” Wanniski wrote. “This is why the President had to bomb Iraq without asking Saddam’s friends and neighbors if it was a good thing to do. They would have told him to cool it.” Presumably, all Iraq needs is a stable, gold-backed currency and then all will be well there!
Will Wanniski succeed in turning the “party of Lincoln” into the “party of McGovern”? Keep watching this space.
