Jack Kemp died last weekend at age 73. Moving remembrances come from Scott Johnson of Powerline, Rick Brookhiser in National Review, Marine veteran James Crabtree, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard, Bruce Bartlett, Peter Wehner and Patrick Ruffini.
My last encounter with Jack came as I was driving on a downtown Washington street and saw him walking on the sidewalk. I rolled down the window and yelled, “Hey, Jack!” and he waved and yelled back. As always he seemed full of energy and good cheer.
Jack was an improbable politician and, for that matter, an improbable quarterback. He grew up in the heavily Jewish Fairfax district in Los Angeles, the son of a man who started off as a truck driver and built a trucking business in booming post-World War II Los Angeles.
He was born in 1935, almost exactly the year that the twenty-something Ronald Reagan moved to Los Angeles to become a movie actor. Even more than Reagan, Kemp seemed to exude the sunniness and optimism of postwar Los Angeles, a city of Midwestern character then, with a sky not yet obscured by gray-green smog.
Kemp was not an early achiever, at least in football. He graduated from Occidental College in the Eagle Rock section of Los Angeles, northeast of downtown, and was a very low pick in the National Football League draft. He bounced around to several teams, then made himself into a star quarterback on the American Football League Buffalo Bills.
I suspect that growing up in a heavily Jewish neighborhood had an effect on Kemp. It probably contributed to his tolerance and total lack of bigotry. And for a professional athlete he developed a huge hunger for learning, reading widely in economics. After he was elected to Congress in 1970 from a mostly suburban Buffalo district, he deployed that learning in a startlingly effective way, developing the Kemp-Roth tax cut proposal that was adopted by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign and then largely enacted into law in 1981.
Kemp did this though he was in the minority throughout his 18-year House career and never served on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. Was he, as Fred Barnes has written, “the most influential House member of the last half-century”? Quite possibly. I remember interviewing him in his little office in (I believe) the Longworth building, the slum of House office buildings. He had no interest in the trappings of power. He only wanted to change America for the better. And he did.
Kemp accomplished what he did even though he was not, in my view, an instinctive politician. He argued cogently that supply-side economics was in the best interests of the poor and middle class. But it was not an easy argument to sell. And in fact Kemp-Roth was only adopted in a period of great economic distress and widespread perplexity, which brings to mind Churchill’s remark in another context that the United States will always do the right thing after having exhausted all the other possibilities. The adoption of Kemp’s policies led to a long period of low-inflation economic growth—something that many Keynesian economists in the 1970s said was impossible.
Many Republicans these days say the party needs to find another Ronald Reagan. I think Republicans would be doing very well if they could find another Jack Kemp. A man with original ideas, but also with unquenchable optimism and unfailing good cheer.
