Morton Kondracke - Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America

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J ack Kemp was the most important politician of the twentieth century who was not president, certainly the most influential Republican. No one has yet written the story of his impact on America and the world. His life and legacy need to be recognizedand thats starting to happen. In this era of political bleakness, both Republicans and Democrats are citing him as a model of what politicians ought to be. That is one of the four reasons why we have written this book.

Above all, Jack Kemp merits a prominent place in American political history because he was Congresss foremost advocate for supply-side economics and the man who steered Ronald Reagan toward adopting it. Hence, he deserves partial credit for not only pulling America out of the deep malaise of the 1970s but also for helping to win the cold war and convert much of the world to democratic capitalism.

The 70s were a dismal decade. It was the era of stagflationsimultaneous high unemployment and soaring inflation. And also of geopolitical reverses: it was the postVietnam era, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan; its Cuban allies advanced in Africa and Central America; and revolutionary Iran held Americans hostage for 444 days. And it was an era of bottomed-out national moraleits nadir when President Carter blamed the acquisitiveness of the American people for the countrys seemingly incurable ills.

In the 1980s it all turned around. The misery index (unemployment plus inflation) fell from 23 in 1980 to 7.7 in 1986. And around the worldespecially in Eastern Europe, but also in Latin America and Asiademocratic capitalism was deemed to be the end of history.

Jack Kemp was at the center of the great turnaround. He did not invent supply-side economics: the combination of lower tax rates, particularly on individual income, and a stable dollar. That was the work of two young economists, Robert Mundell, later a Nobel Prize winner, and Arthur Laffer. But once converted by journalist-agitator Jude Wanniski of the Wall Street Journal, Kemp became the leading political evangelist of the supply-side movement. Lowering tax rates, he argued, would create incentives for work, savings, and investmentand produce booming growth in a way that Keynesian public spending programs had not. His tax billKemp-Roth, a three-year, 30 percent across-the-board cut borrowed from John F. Kennedys 1963 proposalbecame the vehicle for the supply-side revolution.

Kemps enthusiasm for supply-side economics was contagious, and he spearheaded a national movement that amounted to both a political and intellectual revolution in economics. In Congress, senior Republicans resented the presumptuous backbencher, still in his forties, who was treading on tax turf. They also doubted his economics. But junior Republicans unhappy with their partys lack of vitality joined Kemps campaignamong them the future Speaker Newt Gingrich, the future Senate majority leader Trent Lott, future senators Connie Mack and Dan Coats, and longtime party leader Vin Weber. Kemp forged links with policy thinkers in Washington and New York, including Irving Kristol and Mundell, and Robert Bartley, editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal. Kemps office and living room became scenes resembling graduate seminars where the WashingtonNew York nexus came together for debate, but with major policy change as its aim. That aim was achieved; Kemp-Roth became official party policy in 1978. Even GOP graybeards who had previously scorned him signed on.

Then he recruited Ronald Reagan, who made Kemps proposal a centerpiece of his 1980 presidential campaign and, once elected, the basis of Reaganomics. The Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and 1986reducing the top rate from 70 percent to 50 percent, then 28 percentset off an economic boom that lasted into the 2000s.

The achievements of the 1980s were mainly Reagans, but their economic underpinning was Kemps. No Republican politician of the twentieth century who was not president transformed the country the way he didnot Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert Taft, or Nelson Rockefeller. Earl Warren did, but as chief justice, not as governor of California. Nor did any Democrats except possibly Hubert Humphrey, the leading early advocate for civil rights, and Edward Kennedy, author or bipartisan coauthor of dozens of health, education, and civil rights laws.

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Our second reason for writing about Kemp is that he embodied a spirit sorely missing in todays politicsin both parties. Kemp was positive, optimistic, idealistic, energetic, growth- and opportunity-oriented. He was incapable of personal attack and negative campaigning, even when it cost him. The purpose of politics, he said, is not to defeat your opponent as much as it is to provide superior leadership and better ideas than the opposition. He criticized liberals and Democrats, but also green-eyeshade, austerity-minded, Herbert Hoover Republicans. His criticisms were always based on their ideas and policy proposals, never their motives or personal flaws. He believedas he said again and againthat ideas change history. He wanted to change history for the better.

He wanted his own party to once again be the party of Lincoln. Even before very conservative audiences, he argued that the GOP should again become the natural home of African-Americans, as it had been from Lincolns time to Franklin Roosevelts. He insisted it could happen if Republican policies brought growth and prosperity to inner cities. It was unrealistic, probably romantic. But it was sincere. It was famously said of him that as a pro-football star, hed showered with more African-Americans than most Republicans had ever met. He lamented that his party had been largely absent from the civil rights movement and regarded the Southern strategy to win white votes at the expense of blacks a disgrace.

Kemp believed in what he called the American Ideathat the Declaration of Independence was a universal document, that everyone everywhere deserved the right to advance as far as his or her talent and effort would lead. The American idea was Kemps version of Lincolns bedrock principle that the right to rise was the central idea of the United States and applied to black slaves as well as white workers. And like Lincoln, he believed it was the job of government to enable people to achieve their aims and remove obstaclesespecially, in Kemps view, high taxes.