For weeks now, the Scrapbook has been chronicling the strange, symbiotic relationship between Jack Kemp and supply-side publicist Jude Wanniski. Now comes a piece of primary evidence on the meaning of Jack ‘n’ Jude. It’s located on Wanniski’s Web site, which he uses for the worldwide distribution of his correspondence.
Jonathan Chair of the New Republic recently interviewed Wanniski about the Jack ‘n’ Jude dynamic. Wanniski was displeased with the article that resulted. “Your column,” he writes to Chait, “only informs readers that we are so close as to be indistinguishable, and that therefore Jack is my puppet, a man who believes tax cuts can solve all the world’s problems.”
Wanniski complains that this is an unfair construction of the two men’s paired careers and ideas. He then proceeds to prove it isn’t unfair at all. Do tax cuts solve all the world’s problems? They do: “If we could get tax rates and money just right, Jonathan, then the social pathologies that we blame on the greed of the rich or the poor would dissolve, as they have throughout history.”
Is Kemp Wanniski’s puppet? You be the judge. Kemp and he, Wanniski explains, “have been partners for 20 years.” Partners the way “a husband is a partner with his wife.” Or like “the Lone Ranger and Tonto.” And who’s to say “who is the puppet and who the puppeteer in a partnership?”
It looks like Kemp’s the puppet, actually. “In our partnership, Jack’s and mine,” Wanniski explains, “we discovered early on that I had a tremendous comparative advantage over him in cooking up political ideas.” What was Kemp good for? He was the public mouthpiece. “People actually like him,” Wanniski points out, with ghastly candor, but “they have serious doubts about me.”
You bet.
