What Jack Kemp Accomplished
The congressman from Buffalo changed his party and the country for the better.
by Fred Barnes
Jack Kemp was a speaker in search of an audience. But unlike most of Washington, including the city's journalists, Kemp had something important to say. He may have been embarrassed about his academic background--he was a physical education major at Occidental College in California--but the truth was he knew more about economics and what worked in the real world to create growth and jobs than almost anyone else in town.
Absent this, Kemp might have been just another garrulous, likeable Republican on Capitol Hill. But because he knew what he was talking about and events proved him to be correct, he was the most influential House member of the past half-century. Was there anyone in Congress who achieved more? I can't think of anyone.
Here are the four things I give Kemp credit for:
1) Popularizing tax cuts as the best and most reliable way to spur economic growth and create jobs. 2) Persuading Ronald Reagan to adopt a 30 percent reduction in individual income tax rates initially as the main domestic message of his campaign in 1980 and then as the top priority of his presidency. 3) Transforming Republicans from an effete country-club party into a broad-based party with appeal to middle and working class voters. 4) Making, along with Reagan, Republicans the optimistic, positive party of ideas.
That would be an impressive set of accomplishments for a president or a powerful senator. But Kemp managed this as a young House member in the 1970s who never rose to an official position of leadership in Congress. He did it by the power of relentless persuasion and the force of an overpowering personality.
Kemp, a California native, was elected from Buffalo, New York, after he retired from professional football as the quarterback of the Buffalo Bills. The year was 1970, not a particularly good one for Republicans.
He taught himself economics, mainly through reading, and became the champion of tax cuts. (Kemp also mastered the difficult subjects of monetary policy and international economics.) He collected a contentious group of free market economists, so-called supply siders, as advisers and began a crusade to slash tax rates. He was tireless. In 1978, then-Republican national chairman Bill Brock took up the cause, thanks to Kemp, and urged Republican candidates to campaign on the 30 percent tax cut. Many did and Republicans picked up House and Senate seats.
Kemp would have been the logical Republican presidential nominee in 1980, except for one thing. Ronald Reagan, the favorite of the conservative movement, was still around. So Kemp deferred to Reagan. At the GOP convention, his supporters sought to get Reagan to pick Kemp as his vice presidential running mate. But Reagan chose George H.W. Bush, who eight years later defeated Kemp for the 1988 nomination.
By then, Kemp's most influential years were behind him, though he was still active as a proselytizer for tax cuts and for a Republican party with a populist streak. And he remained an enormously popular figure, not just among Republicans and conservatives.
There was a reason for his enduring appeal: Kemp was a good-hearted man who put his philosophy and his cause above personal ambition. His overriding concern was for others and for America.
Kemp died on Saturday at 73. He leaves a large family and a wife, Joanne, who has been enormously influential in her own way, conducting a weekly Bible study in their home for more than 30 years and leading an untold number of people to faith in Jesus Christ as their Savior.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Jack Kemp, My Teacher
At the heart of everything Jack Kemp did was his unshakeable belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every human being.
by Mary Brunette Cannon
In January 1981, at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, I left my obscure college in upstate New York to spend a semester as an intern in Washington, D.C. working for the congressman from the neighboring district. At the time, I thought my days as a student would soon be over, but I learned quickly that my education was just beginning, and my teacher would be Jack Kemp.
I spent most of the next 11 years working for Jack, in his congressional office, his presidential campaign, and at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Each day was an extended seminar in the liberal arts and sciences. Jack's interests were broad and his appetite for knowledge insatiable. Once he discovered something intriguing, his generous spirit compelled him to share it with everyone he met. Most congressmen pass out to their constituents a picture of themselves, or a copy of one of their recent speeches. Visitors to the Kemp office were more likely to leave with a speech by Lech Walesa, or a picture of Winston Churchill. Staffers were sent off to the theater to see Les Miserables, and given books that not only had to be read, but discussed.
Jack is often called a man of ideas, and that is true. His ideas helped spur the economic recovery of the 1980s and pave the way for prosperity and growth. As a self-described "backbencher" in Tip O'Neill's House of Representatives, he was able to work with members of the Democratic party to achieve his goals without sacrificing even the tiniest bit of principle, something today's backbenchers would do well to emulate. Jack's vision was a Republican party with a message that speaks to the universal truths of human freedom and dignity is the roadmap to rebuilding a governing majority.
One of Jack's enduring legacies is the amendment he offered along with Senator Bob Kasten of Wisconsin to deny federal funding to organizations, like the U.N. Fund for Population Control (UNFPA), that supported China's use of coerced abortion as a method of enforcing its one-child per family rule. The Chinese government was taken aback by this initiative when it was first offered in the mid-1980s and sent its ambassador to meet with Jack in his office on Capitol Hill. The diplomat made some formal comments, and Jack listened quietly, a rare response. When he began to respond, he sought to engage the ambassador on a personal level, taking about his own family and background, and asking the ambassador about his. The ambassador seemed stunned by the personal nature of the conversation, but when Jack asked him, "how many children do and your wife have?" he answered quietly that they had three, two more than the number allowed by his regime's population control policy. Jack said, "I know you must love them all very much, and believe they each have something unique to contribute. Could you imagine life without any one of them?"
At the heart of this exchange, and everything Jack did, was his unshakeable belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. This is what inspired his passion for job creation and economic growth; his support for freedom fighters in every corner of the globe; his insistence on a strong defense as a deterrent to war; his work on behalf of the poor, the immigrant, the unborn, and the dispossessed. I traveled with him from the union halls in his district outside Buffalo, New York, to the small towns of Iowa and New Hampshire; from the most blighted and desperate slums in the United States to Prince Charles' private garden at his home, Highgrove. In every circumstance, his message was the same--each and every human being is a precious resource, to be nurtured and defended and given the freedom he needs to fulfill his destiny as, in Kemp's words, "a master carpenter or a prima ballerina--or even a pro quarterback."
Jack's destiny led him to do many extraordinary things, but nothing was more satisfying to him than his life at home with his wife Joanne, his children, and his grandchildren. Joanne once gave me a glimpse into the life they had at home, in what Jack called his "Shangri-la." She said that marriage was an "adventure," and that the most important thing parents can give their children is the knowledge that their mother and father love one another. Of all the lessons I learned from Jack Kemp and his family, that was the most important. And like the countless other students who have been privileged to have Jack Kemp as their teacher, I will miss him.
Mary Brunette Cannon is a former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Public Affairs under Jack Kemp, and worked for him as a policy aide and spokesman from 1981 to 1992.
Remembering Jack Kemp
He planted the seeds of freedom and prosperity in the Republican party.
by Clark Durant
It's early 1987. Jack Kemp is at our home near Detroit on one of his many Michigan visits from 1985 to 1988. We are recruiting precinct delegates, county and district chairs in a ground game for 1988 presidential delegates. My 5-year-old son runs into the room with a small silver cowboy gun and red cowboy boots. And Jack just entertains young John as if he were one of his own boys. And, on command, everybody puts their hands up!
Jack and I met on the Platform Committee of the Republican Party at the national convention in Dallas in August 1984. I was 35. We had a blast. The platform was rich in the ideas of hope, prosperity, and peace. And, no tax increase!, despite the wiggle room Drew Lewis, Bob Dole, and others wanted. Gingrich. Lott. Kasten. Weber. Hyde. Schlafly. These were the movement players. But, Jack was our leader.
Money as good as gold. Reduce taxes to prosperity, to break the cycle of poverty, and to create more capital for the working man and the poor. And, urban homesteading, just like Lincoln. It was morning in America. Ronald Reagan's steady hand had steered our ship of state out of the darkness, despair, and misery of the Carter years into a safe harbor of opportunity and freedom. But, it was Jack Kemp who drew the map, tended the lighthouse, and cleared a wider shore for all to know freedom. The seeds for "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" were planted in that platform by Jack, the co-chair of the foreign policy subcommittee.
I was in a hotel room in Chicago last week. I couldn't sleep. It was 3:30 a.m. I turned on Sports Center to see if the Tigers had won the day before. (I once asked Jack if he liked baseball. "Nope, no quarterback", he said.) There on the screen was Jack's picture with the years 1935 - 2009 just below. The dreaded image. I shuttered for just a moment. All knew it was coming. Now it had, only nine hours before to a friend, and a good man, father, and husband. The quick story was upbeat (could it be any other way with Jack?) and covered the sports and public life essentials. But, as I was sifting through my dusty basement boxes last night, I was reminded time and again what a wonderful gift Jack's life had been to me, my family, and countless others over the years.
For 1988 Michigan had adopted an outlier process to decide presidential delegates, even before Iowa and New Hampshire. Jack visited the state, alone and with others, in the next three years as if he was Paul the evangelist. (But, he avoided a Friday night or weekend event. He wanted to get home to be with his family and loved watching his sons play football.) Like Paul, he built hearts and minds of true believers, and not just for an election cycle. And, like Paul, he journeyed where the faithful had not gone before. We did labor union halls, city churches, and urban schools. And, if we ended the day generating funds in the home or club of a well connected friend, it was always the same message everywhere: prosperity is rooted in freedom not privilege, lower tax rates create growth and upward mobility, and politics is helping people have more control over their own lives.
In our old green station wagon I travelled with three of our children to Iowa for a long Thanksgiving in 1987. We visited cities and little towns, worked shopping malls, senior residences, and popular restaurants. The kids were interviewed by small town newspapers. Jack called me from Washington and asked how we got the great coverage. "Jack", I said, "whoever turns down an interview with an 11, 9, or 7-year-old, particularly to find out why they have travelled so far and worked so late with silly, but colorful, homemade signs and t-shirts saying Kemp for President?" They could repeat Jack's favorite lines: politics is for everybody, ideas matter, freedom brings prosperity, and we must be the party of Lincoln.
Jack didn't get the nomination in '88. But the ideas he stood for (tax cuts across the board, enterprise zones, freedom around the globe, the value of every human person, born and unborn) helped Ronald Reagan become president, and the ideas still resonate. They can and should inform our contemporary politics. The last time I saw Jack was when he and Joanne came to our home for lunch during the Super Bowl of 2006. There is a Churchill picture in my library. Jack looked at the picture. He turned to me and said, "now there was a man of destiny". Jack, my friend, so were you. Great game. Your best. And everybody has their hands up.
Clark Durant is CEO of the Cornerstone Schools in Detroit. He served as one of the four national co-chairs in Jack Kemp's 1988 presidential campaign.
Kemp and Reagan
What today's Republicans could learn from their relationship.
by David Smick
When people picture Jack Kemp, the Republican congressman, cabinet member, and presidential candidate who died last week, they think of Ronald Reagan's sidekick. They envision the two men--a football player and an actor--enjoying a warm, cozy, political partnership that guided 1980s economic policy.
What I remember is just the opposite. Kemp was often a thorn in Reagan's side, a constant pest. The relationship nonetheless transformed GOP economic policy. More importantly, Kemp's populist, blue-collar influence on Reagan stands as a powerful reminder of how far today's GOP has strayed from its original mission.
I will always remember a taller-than-expected, rosy-cheeked Reagan in late 1979 barreling into a hotel suite at the Airport Marriott in Los Angeles. He was there to meet Kemp and his entourage for three days of discussions about fashioning a national economic recovery plan.
The 1970s stagflation and tax bracket creep had hit middle class families with the individual tax rates reserved for the super rich. Like today, average folk were financially suffocating.
Kemp's style in those meetings was aggressive. The young Buffalo congressman relentlessly attacked established GOP economic orthodoxy, which he argued ignored the tax code's assault on wage-earner income. One particular point of contention was Reagan's fixation on government waste, including his continual mention of the so-called Chicago Welfare Queen (a mythic figure who had collected 85 separate welfare checks). The impression Reagan left was that this pilfering was somehow to blame for America's ills, an absurdity.
Kemp insisted the country's most acute problem was a stifling and intolerable tax on labor. This was not a Wall Street issue, but a lunch pail issue. Kemp was less concerned with the cost of capital than with the cost of groceries. With his own streak of blue-collar populism, Reagan saw the same vision, and the rest is history. The combination of Fed Chairman Volcker's aggressive monetary policy and the Reagan-Kemp individual tax cuts, was followed by a period of robust growth and job creation.
This economic platform produced three quick GOP presidential victories--1980, 1984, and 1988. The question is why ever since the tax cut issue has been such a loser for GOP presidential candidates. What did an actor and a football player know that made them so successful?
Here's a clue: Reagan and Kemp acknowledged the importance not only of physical and financial capital, but of human capital. For decades, GOP policymakers worshipped at the shrine of generous tax treatment for machinery. Kemp and Reagan realized that for the economy to prosper in the long term, the tax code must not value machinery over people. Workers and investors must be treated equally. The Reagan Democrats and independents found this new-found GOP concentration on middle class financial angst appealing, and helped the GOP achieve a majority vote in successive elections.
To be fair, today's Republicans are a victim of the GOP's earlier success in defeating stagflation, indexing the tax code, and relieving the tax burden almost entirely for a lot of lower-middle class earners. That has left Republicans repeating the self-defeating mantra that the top 40 percent of income earners pay 90 percent of federal income taxes. True, but that's also the heart of the GOP political problem. For the other 60 percent of Americans, federal income tax cuts are no longer that meaningful.
Unlike Kemp and Reagan in the 1980s, Republicans have not found a positive solution to their political predicament. For example, until the current financial crisis, the U.S. economy produced unprecedented levels of wealth. What is surprising is how little the GOP did to try to enlarge the base of capital ownership. Kemp and Reagan would have suggested reform of the entire tax code. Why? Because in an expanding globalized economy of appreciating financial assets, mere wage earners find it difficult to keep pace.
Some Democrats including Bill Bradley and Hillary Clinton chose the approach of establishing birthright investment accounts for newborns to create a new generation of mini-capitalists.
The point is that the GOP seemed oblivious that Americans yearn to be transformed from labor workers into capital owners. They failed to realize the need for some connective mechanism so a large segment of society could personally benefit from the market economy.
Republicans now blame Barack Obama for fueling divisional class politics, but he is the effect not the cause of the GOP's missed opportunity. The Republican party lost sight of its original mission which is to expand opportunity. This mission was perhaps best summarized by Abraham Lincoln in his first State of the Union Address in 1861. Lincoln said, "Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital ... could never exist if labor did not exist first." Jack Kemp could not have said it better himself.
David Smick, is Chairman & CEO of Johnson Smick International and the author, most recently, of the book The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy. From 1978-84, he was Chief of Staff to Rep. Jack Kemp.
The Power of Persuasion
Jack Kemp and Milton Friedman shared the message of economic freedom with anybody who would listen.
by John C. Weicher
Jack Kemp frequently reminded me of Milton Friedman--I worked for Kemp at HUD for four years, and I studied economics at the University of Chicago for five. They were certainly different--the athlete turned politician and the distinguished economist and scholar--and while they are both often regarded as architects of modern conservatism they didn't always agree. But they both had strong views on important public policy issues, and they both took every opportunity to push their views. Any number of times over more than four decades, I saw Friedman vigorously discussing the benefits of free trade or the flaws in Federal Reserve policy with an intern or research assistant who had ventured to ask about something he had just said in a lecture, and who then found himself debating Milton Friedman about economics, to his surprise and often to his dismay. Milton Friedman thought anyone was worth talking to, and worth persuading.
Jack Kemp was also always willing to discuss his ideas with anyone who would listen. Or who had to listen: as HUD Secretary, Kemp necessarily held many meetings with housing lobbyists in his HUD office. Whatever the meeting was ostensibly about, Kemp was always ready to explain why there shouldn't be any capital gains tax on stock sales, any more than on home sales. His interests were broad. Those were the years when the Soviet empire was breaking up, and Kemp was always a champion of freedom, anywhere in the world. Something would remind him of what was happening somewhere in eastern Europe, and suddenly he would be fervently explaining how important it was to promote freedom in, say, Lithuania, and the lobbyist, who didn't know a thing about Lithuania including where it was and didn't care either, had to play along and pretend to be interested, and try to carry on his half of the conversation. Those meeting were always great fun, for everyone but the lobbyist.
Neither Kemp nor Friedman ever seemed to get discouraged. Long ago, when I was an economics professor at Ohio State, the University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate George Stigler came to campus to present a paper. At the lunch with faculty members before his talk, Stigler mentioned that he had happened to share a cab with Friedman to the airport. Stigler asked where Friedman was going, and Friedman said: to Washington, because there was a 10 percent chance to establish floating exchange rates this time. And Stigler, who had been a close friend of Friedman's since their graduate school days, said, "Milton--the President doesn't have a 10% chance of getting floating exchange rates!" And we all laughed about Friedman butting his head against the same wall once again.
That was the winter of 1971; the President was Richard Nixon; and by the summer of 1971 the United States had floating exchange rates. We have had floating exchange rates ever since.
When Jack Kemp came to HUD, he had two major causes: enterprise zones for distressed city neighborhoods, and tenant ownership of public housing. He had been advocating both for more than a decade. Nobody thought either one would be enacted. But it turned out that Kemp inherited a number of scandals from his predecessor, which came to light only after he came to HUD, and he devoted his first year in office to developing a far-reaching set of reforms that would prevent future scandals. Those reforms were worked out in a long series of meetings among Kemp's senior staff in the summer and fall. They became the HUD Reform Act of 1989, which Congress passed almost exactly as Kemp proposed within a very few months. Throughout the process, Kemp kept reminding his staff, "Remember what we came to HUD for!" Not just to reform HUD, but to create enterprise zones and tenant ownership and help poor people live better lives.
The HUD Reform Act established Kemp's authority in housing policy. In 1990 Congress approved his proposed programs for tenant ownership in public housing and other subsidized projects. The Los Angeles riots in early 1992 suddenly put enterprise zones on the front political burner, with such unlikely advocates as Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. But the Democrats in control of Congress were not interested in providing a political victory to a Republican incumbent President running for re-election, and the Treasury Department was unenthusiastic. Kemp campaigned almost alone for his vision of communities "from sea to shining sea" where entrepreneurs could create businesses, and most especially create jobs for the poor residents, without punitive taxation and prohibitive regulation. He almost won in the Senate, forcing the Democrats to come at least halfway; but enterprise zones ultimately wound up in a broader bill that the president, with Kemp's urging, felt it necessary to veto.
Kemp's programs did not long survive his term at HUD. Although the 1992 Democratic platform paid him the tribute of supporting his tenant ownership programs, the Clinton Administration asked Congress to repeal them in 1994, and Congress obliged. In 1995, however, President Clinton launched a low-income homeownership initiative that continued through his administration. The new administration also created "empowerment zones" and "enterprise communities," borrowing Kemp's words but creating programs that were very different from enterprise zones: grant programs in a few large cities, with no regulatory reform or tax relief. But the HUD Reform Act is still on the books, and while housing program advocates and project developers often complain about its complications, the abuses of the 1980s have not recurred.
Milton Friedman and Jack Kemp share another distinction. Some of their causes are not faring well right now. Efforts to promote homeownership for lower-income families are being blamed for the subprime mortgage mess, and educational choice, which Friedman championed in his later years, may be reduced for poor children in the District of Columbia as Congress moves to terminate a federal program to provide a modest number of tuition vouchers, with no protest from the White House or Washington's mayor.
But they were both optimists as well as advocates, and who is to say they were wrong?
John C. Weicher is Director of the Center for Housing and Financial Markets at Hudson Institute. From 1989 to 1993 he was Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, serving Secretary Jack Kemp. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.