Dan

Calabrese

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May 4, 2009

Jack Kemp: When Conservatism Met Compassion

In 1993, when I was working as a reporter for the Grand Rapids Business Journal, Jack Kemp – who died on Saturday – came to Grand Rapids to give a speech about urban and economic issues. Since I was, and remain, an enthusiast for supply-side economics, I actually did my homework for a change and came up with questions in advance of the press conference I would be attending.

Lucky me, Kemp called on me for the first question, and I asked him something about applying conservative economic principles to solving urban issues. As Kemp waxed on at length about the application of incentives and the freeing of capital for investment in the inner city, the six or seven other local reporters in the room looked as though they were trying in vain to understand a guy speaking Romanian.

I asked a followup. Kemp waxed on some more. Not intending to monopolize the press conference, I stood down after the next answer and waited for someone else to put a hand up. I looked around the room and saw nothing but blank faces indicating, “We’ve got nothing.”

Delighted, I put my hand up again.

I taped the whole thing – what became a one-on-one interview between me and the man I hoped would be the next president of the United States. Less than a year removed from his job as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and just months into the new Clinton Administration, Kemp was brimming with ideas about how to keep free-market economics alive even as the country was taking a turn to the left. (Sound familiar?)

I even wrote on the label of the tape, “Interview with President Kemp.” You’ve got to be optimistic.

And Kemp was optimistic by nature. True, he never became president, and you can’t really describe running for vice president with Bob Dole as getting close. But Kemp was a conservative ideas man at a time when the nation was reeling from the effects of heavy-handed government intervention into markets, and people were willing to hear what a passionate supply-sider had to say.

Kemp was not the type to break down his ideas into simplified sound bites – for the sake of the media or anyone else. His ideas weren’t that simple, and he wasn’t going to pretend they were for the sake of a segment on the news. If that cost him PR points or political victories, he was willing to accept that as part of the price you paid for being serious about policy.

And yet this star quarterback and favorite son of blue-collar Buffalo, New York, which he represented for nine terms in Congress, was operating under principles that, at their core, were simple and straightforward. If you tax something, he liked to say, you get less of it. If you reward something, you get more of it. And he was one of the few conservatives who was passionate about finding a way to apply these principles not only to the nation in general, but to the nation’s most depressed and needy areas – its inner cities.

Today’s conservatives may want to note that economic opportunity for the inner-city poor was not just on Kemp’s agenda, it was at the top of it. They may also want to note that guest worker programs for non-citizen immigrants – and a path to legality for illegal immigrants already here – was on Kemp’s agenda as well. He understood that such priorities were both good for people and good for the country. That they were also good politics for Republicans was a bonus.

When Kemp could get his ideas across clearly to inner-city and minority audiences, they embraced the ideas and embraced him. He urged his fellow conservatives to do more of the same, rather than seeing inner cities as areas to be ignored because they never vote Republican anyway.

Of course, not all conservatives wanted to hear what Kemp had to say. Getting down and dirty to solve urban problems would take many of them way outside their comfort zones. And at times, Kemp’s intellectual heft became too much for people just trying to meander their way through a political agenda.

You may not know that former Vice President Dan Quayle actually wrote memoirs, and you surely don’t care, but at one point Quayle wrote that then-President George H.W. Bush would become irritated with Kemp for supposedly rambling on in cabinet meetings and not coming to any discernible point.

Hmm. The guess here is that the point was thoughtful and compelling, and simply lost on the leaders of a fairly rudderless administration who didn’t want to be bothered with having to engage in actual serious thought.

Jack Kemp didn’t just mouth support for conservative ideas. He tried his damndest to make them work to lift up the people who needed it most. The best way for today’s conservatives to honor Kemp’s memory would be to do likewise. And they might actually rediscover their political prowess in the process.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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