Paul Ryan was a waiter at Tortilla Coast, a Capitol Hill restaurant, when he first encountered Jack Kemp. Ryan had worked for Senator Bob Kasten (R-Wis.), who lost his race for reelection in 1992. Ryan was killing time in Washington before going to graduate school in economics.
Ryan, then 23 and already a believer in free market capitalism, had read Kemp’s book An American Renaissance. The book “had perfectly and succinctly described my own political views and philosophy,” he wrote later. “So, out of respect, when I waited on him I didn’t try to sell him on the Sunset Sauce.”
A few weeks later, Ryan learned Empower America, a new think tank headed by Kemp and Bill Bennett, would soon be established and was looking for a young person who understood economics. He applied, was interrogated intensely by Kemp and Bennett, and got the job.
One thing led to another, and by 1998, when Ryan won a House seat in Wisconsin, he had become Kemp’s leading acolyte in politics. Kemp died in 2009. Ryan, having been elected House speaker last week, is now the embodiment of Kemp’s vision of a country brimming with opportunity and an advocate of his supply-side path to economic growth.
Yet there are important differences. Ryan often sounds like Kemp, especially when he talks about “growth,” which was Kemp’s favorite word. But he is not a replica of Kemp. Not only do their styles contrast—Kemp was ebullient, Ryan more analytical—Ryan has updated Kempism for the 21st century.
How so? When Morton Kondracke and I interviewed Ryan last year for our book Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America, he said it “never really necessarily sat right” with him that Kemp was indifferent to deficits, debt, and bigger government. What’s different from the 1970s and 1980s—the Kemp era—is “the debt has gotten so big it’s growth-retarding,” Ryan said. But growth remains the overriding goal, “better than just cut, cut, cut [and] balance the budget.”
Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future, unveiled in 2008, reflected a divergence from Kemp. Among other ideas, Ryan proposed to reform Medicare and Social Security, a daring political step that Kemp would probably not have taken. Indeed, Kemp thought Ryan should not have agreed to be chairman of the House Budget Committee because it is associated with spending cuts.
The Roadmap and the way Ryan went about promoting it did for him what the 30 percent cut in tax rates on individual income had done for Kemp. Ryan didn’t criticize Republican leaders for not adopting it. He simply pushed it on his own. And it made him the most influential Republican in Congress on domestic policy.
Kemp never attacked anyone personally, much less the GOP House leadership. He went around them. He recruited Senator Bill Roth of Delaware as cosponsor and got Republican national chairman Bill Brock to endorse the tax cut. The Kemp-Roth bill never won a majority in the House. But Kemp became a major political figure, especially after it was enacted at President Reagan’s behest in 1981 and generated two decades of robust economic growth. Meanwhile, Republicans became the party of tax cuts, not austerity.
Both Ryan and Kemp seized their first chance to be elected to the House. But their careers progressed differently. Ryan is a man of the House. He won the job he most wanted: chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the tax-writing committee. Speaker was not one of his goals.
Kemp was not a man of the House. He didn’t much care whether Republicans controlled the House or whether he chaired a committee. (He did become head of the House GOP conference.) Newt Gingrich saw Kemp as a presidential figure, addressing the entire nation as he pursued a vision for lifting everyone to a better place in life. Ryan’s audience was members of Congress.
At Empower America in the 1990s, Ryan worked for both Kemp and Bennett, who’d been education secretary in the Reagan administration. Bennett is not alone in seeing Kemp as “pretty close” to being an economic determinist. Ryan is not. Kemp was enthusiastic and impatient. “Paul is more focused and controlled,” Bennett says.
Bennett recalls discussing hunting with Kemp and Ryan, and what it’s like to sit in a blind waiting for prey. Kemp merely grunted. He wasn’t interested. Bennett says he couldn’t imagine Kemp sitting still in a blind for three hours. For Ryan, no problem.
It’s telling which sports they took to. Kemp played professional football and loved tennis. “With Jack, sports were always a joy,” Bennett told me. Ryan subjects himself to the P90X exercise routine. “It’s all about self-discipline and punishment,” Bennett says.
Kemp taught himself economics. Ryan studied economics at Miami University in Ohio, then taught himself the budget. There’s only one way to do that, he told me in 2011. “You read it. You literally just read it. Having a knowledge of economic policy and having an economic doctrine is one thing. But understanding the federal budget and its components is another. Not many people do that. It’s fairly laborious. I’m a self-taught person.”
Ryan’s admiration for Kemp bubbles over in his 2014 book The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea. Kemp was his inspiration. “Looking back, I can see now that it was his enthusiasm for his beliefs that truly pulled me into politics. . . . Jack’s excitement for ideas and the way they could improve people’s lives made me see public policy not as a hobby, but as a vocation.”
After working with Jack Kemp, graduate school didn’t have a chance.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
