May 7, 2009
Kemp Dies, Takes Republicanism With Him
It seems so very long ago that I, as a
starry-eyed 17-year-old suburbanite, was
sufficiently young and naive enough to
enthusiastically support B-grade actor
Ronald Wilson Reagan for the presidency of
the United States. But support Reagan I did
– sufficiently enthusiastically and vocally
as to earn myself attendance at the 1980
Republican National Convention in Detroit
and subsequently to Reagan’s inauguration.
Jack Kemp’s passing this past week spurred
renewed reflection upon that convention –
the names, the faces, the frenetic flurry of
politicking taking place on the convention
floor, in the corridors, in the hotel
restaurants and virtually anywhere there was
room for one person to stand and shame,
cajole, wheedle, intimidate, reason or plead
support for a position or a candidate out of
another. Some of the most effective
wheedlers and pleaders at that time were
working on behalf of this particular former
football hero, then angling for the party’s
vice presidential nod.
Kemp wasn’t alone: Richard Lugar was
mounting a fairly aggressive campaign of his
own, and much attention – and derision – was
given to one George Herbert Walker Bush. The
plurality of grassroots enthusiasm, however,
lay elsewhere: Buttons, signs, stickers,
placards proclaiming “Reagan/Kemp” were
thrust into the hands of virtually anyone
willing to carry one, and plenty of people
wanted to.
In his off-floor address to attendees, Kemp
made his case as the true conservative’s
candidate – the no-nonsense,
straight-talking, right-as-right gets
copilot for the incipient Reagan revolution,
and the crowd loved it. This was the man
they wanted to stand beside Reagan, ensuring
that the Gipper brooked no compromises with
the reviled liberals. They were, after all,
the true believers – the “real” Republicans
who waved the flags, shouted the slogans and
traveled thousands of miles mostly at their
own expense to advance the conservative
cause in this most dispirited of rust belt
cities. Bush? They wanted no part of him –
“weak,” “pandering,” “moderate.”
In the end, though, we knew who had won out.
Bush was the safe choice, the
middle-of-the-road pragmatist who’d win over
Democrats and independents. Kemp, as
enamored as the party base may have been of
him, was seen as too right-wing, too
extremist, too uncompromising. America
wasn’t ready, we were told, for a truly
hard-right administration.
A lot has changed in 29 years: The
Republican Party has migrated from
conservative to crazy, holding forth a
gun-crazed Alaskan soccer mom and an obese,
bloviating proto-fascist as its standard
bearers on the stump and in the media
respectively whilst driving traditional
garden-variety reactionaries of the Arlen
Specter variety from its ranks. In the
meantime, the late Jack Kemp has undergone a
transformation as well, although through no
particular effort of his own: Once decreed
too conservative, too extreme to share a
presidential ticket with the most
conservative president of the latter half of
the 20th Century, he is now
eulogized as a moderate, as a voice of
reason and balance.
That Kemp’s demise and Specter’s defection
should occur synchronously seems symbolic:
For generations, both men had stood at the
epicenter of the Republican Party’s
corridors of power, the establishmentarian’s
establishmentarians, old-guard conservative
stalwarts emblematic of Big Business/Big
Military Republicanism – the Republicanism
of Nixon, of Reagan and of a century’s worth
of electoral success.
Now that they’re gone, the Palins, Limbaughs
and Steeles stand in their stead,
crazed-eyed pretenders to the throne,
representative of an insurgent John Birchite
class of ideologues preoccupied with party
purification and with unhealthy impulses
towards authoritarianism. To the delight of
progressives everywhere, they are managing
to sabotage their party’s future electoral
chances more effectively than any number of
ACORN moles, and to undercut any credibility
men like Jack Kemp may have once lent it.
Jack Kemp’s official cause of death was
cancer. It is hard to believe, though, that
a broken heart was not a contributing
factor.
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2009 North Star Writers Group. May not
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