WHAT HAPPENED TO JACK KEMP?

Kemp has always been a Republic’an with a difference on racial attitudes, but over the lst three years he has turned up the rhetorical volue, issuing dark warnings about the persistence of racism, the dangers of dismantling social programs, and so on and on. Every Republican you talk to has at l’east one story of Kemp’s contrariness. When the Prison Fellowship, a Christian missionary group led by Charles Colson, held a Maryland retreat in June, Kefip — whose wife Joanne sits on the board — went along as a spouse. As the afternoon’s proceedings drew to a lose, Kemp rose from the audience to inveigh agaxnst cooperating with Republican efforts to end affrmative action. One parcipant remembers that Kemp “wasn’t listening to anybody and went on for 45 minutes.”

Two years ago, during an after-dinner panel at a Chicago fundraiser for Kemp’s thinlY-tank Empower America, a relative of Blockbuster Vdeo mogul Wayne Huizenga asked Kemp a question at&out “protecting our borders” from immigration. “Huzenga” Kemp roared. “Now that doesn’t sound like the name of someone who came over on the Mayflower.”

Kemp’s discomfort with the GOP pf the 1990s has led him on at least two occasions into active political opposition. In 1994, with Republicans on the brink of a legislative takeover in California, he campaigned against the state’s anti-mmigrant Proposition 187 the centerpiece of Gov. Pete Wilson’s campaign.

That, of course, was no sin againsReaganite conservatism. Open immigration was a dSgma of the economic-freedom right for much of th1980s — even if Kemp had taken it to an extreme as’Bush’s housing secretary, banning immigration respectors from entering public-housing projects to search for undocumented workers.

Affirmative action, a core Republican issue, is a different matter. 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. “Race alone should not be the criterion,” Kemp said, “but race could be considered as you try to broaden the base of economic opportunities.” This was high apostasy, and Kemp threatened to disassociate himself from any campaign that followed a contrary agenda. “If ” 96 is run on dividing races,” he said, “I will not participate in that.”

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. 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.” 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.” With Republicans in power, Kemp has gone from Happy Warrior to Reluctant one. “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?

This was supposed to be Kemp’s moment. Since 1980, he has consistently been the favored presidential nominee of Republican activists. (A 1992 convention poll showed Kemp at almost 40 percent, with no one else out of single digits.) And Kemp in no small measure made the people who made the Contract with America. The Conservative Opportunity Society, Newt Gingrich’s main rhetorical vehicle before his election as minority whip in 1989, was founded on consciously Kempite lines. For the past 10 years, a small group of legislators, called “The Amigos” – Kemp, Gingrich, Sens. Trent Lott and Connie Mack, former Rep. Vin Weber, sometimes House majority leader Dick Armey, and (infrequently) Sen.

Dan Coats — have met for dinner almost every month to discuss personal and political lssues. Among his friends and political allies, Kemp hhs always been first among equals.

It was after one such meetinin January that Kemp decided to pull out of the “9i5 campaign. Kemp attributes the decision to an impatience with fundraising, but the rap on Kemp in some ativist circles — that he raises money and thanks donors poorly — is unfounded. He raised $ 2.6 million for his congressional campaigns in both 1984 and 1986, and $ 16.7 million for his presidential run in 1988.

Fear of fundraising surely is pad of the story; asked whether he would run if draftel, he replies, “Of course.” But Kemp was troubled ly something else: finding himself at odds with his fllow Republicans. He has been largely silent on the Co’ntract with America. Aside from a captal-gaxns tax cut, the Contract was dedicated to small-government refoirms that Kemp has traditionally ignored, even opposed. “Jack is ripping mad that he campaigned in 150 racs last year and didn’t really get much credit,” says ne former staffer. “And he’s right. But did he talk a13out the Contract? No. He talked about h/s issues.” Hiissues are increasingly race and poverty. “It’s no seret, ” Kemp told a reporter in January, “that Jack KeHp will depart from the budget and Contract with AHerica if it doesn’t include a dramatic change in the’,inner-city investment climate.”

“To him, the villains are all on the right,” says one of Kemp’s oldest congressional allies. “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. He figured a campaign would put him in a series of o,’ngoing arguments with conservatives.”

Kemp has always been concerned about the down-trodden, and optimistic about govemental solutions.

One of the things that has made hm so different — and appealing — as a politician is that thse biases are wholly idealistic and have no pragmatior Machiavellian basis. Kemp likes to tell stories abo’ut campaigning in union halls in the district he represented for 18 years in Congress; but in fact, especially” after redistricting in the early 80s, the New York 31st vas solidly Republican and suburban, and Kemp’s conservauve Republican successor, Bill Paxon, won safely in it once Kemp had left. There’s no pragmatic explanation for Kemp’s interest in race, either: His district was 1 percent black.

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. Kemp experimented with a number of”empowerment” programs, all of which began with supply-side ideas and wound up with gargantuan price tags. David From 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. 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. Even the liberal Nicholas Lemann saw Kemp as “reliving with an almost eerie exactitude the early machinations that preceded the War on Poverty.” 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.

He also began “building bridges” to blacks — specifically to the black far left that cares about housing issues. Memorable was Democratic party activist Kimi Gray, the autocratic den mother of Washington’s Kenilworth-Parkside housing project, whom Kemp described as “my hero.” In September, he was one of the few white Republicans to attend (as the guest of Rangel) the annual soire of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has been conspicuously inhospitable to his fellow Republican Gary Franks, and which gave O.J. lawyer Johnnie Cochran a lengthy standing ovation that night.

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.” As late as May 1994 Kemp was warning that Republicans would “never be a majority again” unless they courted minorities. 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. 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. Clint Bolick thinks Kemp has made real inroads. This year he asked a left-wing Latino activist in the Alazanapache housing project in San Antonio whether Kemp could get any votes there. Says Bolick, “The guy told me, “If Kemp were running for pres dent, he would carry Alazanapache.'”

But Kemp isn’t running for president. So he is using Empower America, the orgahization he cofounded with William J. Bennett, as “his platform on these issues, a platform that may be’less permanent than thought. When it was founded in 1993, most looked on it as the nucleus of a Kenp presidential campaign. Now that there’s no campaign, staffers have fled in droves, and the organization ideep in debt — to the tune of hundreds of thousands df dollars, by one account. Kemp has said in foundation circles that Empower will be dissolved after next year’s Republican convention.

Meanwhile, Kemp is keeping him’self in the public eye through the 14-member National Commission on Economic Growth and Tax Reform that he chairs. 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. (Such continuing loyalty is not unusual for Kemp veterans.)

Kemp’s people also hoped it would foster a friendship between Kemp and Dole, who have never been close. 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. ” There is no quid pro quo, and no promise,” a Kemp friend confirms, “but it has been talked about.”

Such an ambition could explain the anguished vacillations Kemp went through in the aftermath of the Sperling breakfast. Kemp’s blast was poorly timed — just days before Dole was to introduce a Senate bill to abolish affirmative action at the federal level. While claiming to have been misquoted, Kemp called immediately after the breakfast, told Dole what had happened, and stopped by later in the day. “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. “Only a sense of ‘ What the hell is Jack doing?” Dole gets upset about that kind of lack of discipline.”

Meanwhile, Dole staffers are working privately on their own tax plan, to be unveiled in the general election. The first model — a two-rate fiat 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.

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. 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. He has backed off, and Powell is now “all he talks about,” according to one Empower associate. Kemp has been in touch with Powell through his friend and Powell’s chief adviser Ken D!berstein. (Duberstein has reportedly sought Kemp’s” advice on how the pro- choice Powell could finesse /he abortion issue with the religious right.) According to columnist Robert D. Novak, both Kemp and llis old comrade-in- arms ex-Wisconsin Sen. Robert KaYten are seeking to “convert” Powell to supply-side economics.

Even as he hatches hs wagon to these unorthodox candidacies, Kemp nonethelesretains the ear of the new generation of orthodox Republican leaders. 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. After last year’s D.C. mayoral primary in which Gingrich described Maridn Barry as a “convicted felon” who’d offered ” failed leadership,” he seemed on a collision course with the returning mayor. Lately the Speaker, at Kemp’s urgihg, has been pushing to turn D.C. into a Hong Korg-style enterprise zone with no capital-gains taxes “and an exemption from federal income taxes. Kemp rveals that the plan is Barry’s. “He called me because I’d played it straight with the city when we tried to cohvert some public housing,” Kemp says proudly. Puting the plan in a racial context, Kemp told a lournahst, “Home rule is a civil-rights issue for the 90s, with “the same appeal as South Africa in the years of apartheld.”

Kemp set up another Gingrich “meeting on June 7, this time with Bob Dole and mcommg Howard University president H. Patrick Swyget. Howard, a D.C.- based black university on whose bo’ard Kemp sits, had been receiving $ 196 million in “federal subsidies, which the House Budget Committe’e called for zeroing out over seven years. Howard’s fundang, unlike affirmative action, isn’t a front-line conservative issue, and Kemp may be right to protect Republicans from accusations of spite and vengefulness. But it remains an unlikely backwater for the onetime” heir to Reagan to be lingering in. Gingrich intervened to stop the cuts — on the same day, coincidentally, that Standard and Poor’s, following suit from Mooldy’s, downgraded Howard’s bonds.

Kemp’s friends say that on more than one occasion, he has expressed concern thJt the “Republican party is moving too far to the right.’Yet he claims he’s misunderstood by those who see h’im veering left. “I spend 95 percent of my speeches ,beating the left to death on socialism, health care, taxes, devaluation of the frickin” peso. I was the only Repubhcan to go public against the White House, the IMF, and Yale University on the Mexico bailout], and I did not get a single line. When I criticized the Republicans for supporting the deal, that’s when I got press.”

Nonetheless, Kemp has drifted far from Republican voters on a couple of important issues. His constituent profile can, fairly or unfairly, be caricatured as elite financial interests, liberal journalists, and minorities. That troubles a middle-class electorate that has not yet given supply-side economics a full-throated endorsement. 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. affair. Kemp’s willingness to live with affrmative action is particularly suspect. That program retards precisely the things that Kemp professes to hold most precious: entrepreneurial initiative, job creation, free association. “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.

That’s a bigger problem for Kemp than it would be for other politicians. 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. But just as he lacks a voice without a presidential candidacy, he lacks an identity without a coherent body of doctrine.

“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. But because of the way he has worked since he went to HUD, he hasn’t rigorously addressed any issues in seven years. You can’t raise race without raising big government. And this is where, for Jack, rigorous thinking doesn’t come in.”

In his increasing marginalization, Kemp may be merely a victim of his successes. 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. His diffculties with the tax commission and with small-government conservatives may be due to the successes of his progrowth tax policies, which have freed conservatives finally to launch a frontal assault on spending. Kemp is not yet in danger of becoming a renegade Republican crank, along the lines of Harold Stassen or John Anderson. 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.

By Christopher Caldwell