photo, Sen.. Barack Obama & Jack Kemp, by Austin Bonner, used
pursuant to CC license
by Damozel | The New York Times has the story:
Mr. Kemp was secretary of housing and urban development under the first President George Bush and the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1996. But his greatest legacy may stem from his years as a congressman from Buffalo, especially 1978, when his argument for sharp tax cuts to promote economic growth became party policy, one that has endured to this day.
Mr. Kemp, having embraced a supply-side economic theory, told the House that year that the nation suffered under a “tax code that rewards consumption, leisure, debt and borrowing, and punishes savings, investment, work and production.” (More....)
I don't have much to say about this side of Kemp's philosophy except that you can look around you now and see where it leads. Melissa McEwen writes:
Of course, Kemp served another role in the GOP, one which really resonates just now.
Mr. Kemp’s other great cause, in his 18 years in the House and for three decades thereafter, was to get his party to seek more support from blacks and other minorities.
“The party of Lincoln,” he wrote after the 2008 election, “needs to rethink and revisit its historic roots as a party of emancipation, liberation, civil rights and equality of opportunity for all.” (NYT)
At First Draft, Athenae says: "He was absolutely right, so why didn't they listen?"
J.P. Green of The Democratic Strategist, writes:
Kemp, a former GOP VP nominee, HUD Secretary and congressman from Buffalo, earned his creds in race relations early on, as an all-pro quarterback who supported Black players' boycott of New Orleans in 1965 because of segregated cabs and nightclubs in that city. He was a vocal supporter of civil rights, affirmative action and rights for illegal immigrants and called himself a "bleeding-heart conservative."
What has not been reported in the obits in the major rags is that Kemp also provided pivotal, perhaps decisive support for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday legislation, twisting the arms of GOP moderates and even some conservatives to support the bill. He remained a friend of Black leaders, including Coretta Scott King, even while she lobbied against the Kemp-Roth legislation.
As Joe Gandelman at TMV observes, there is a certain irony in his death at a time when the GOP seems determined to bring about its own demise through exclusion of any but the most extreme views. Centrist Gandelman writes:
During a week when some pundits were warning that “big tent” Republicanism was figuratively dying off, Kemp — who successfully pushed Reagan-era conservatism and the idea of supply side economics forward into the country’s political mainstream — was an unabashed, enthusiastic advocate of “big tent” Republicanism that would try to win over, convince and embrace all persuasions and races and invite them to work with - and vote for the GOP. And now he is literally gone.
His approach was the antithesis of his party’s present talk radio political culture approach which seems to put a premium on exclusion, ideological purification and, in the case of moderate Republicans, Democrats and even some independents and non-Republican moderates (branded as wishy washy or closet Democratic partisans in attempts to discredit their criticism) demonization. (TMV)
Athenae further muses on what the exclusionary tactics of the GOP -- including their preference for short-term gains -- tells you about the party as a whole:
They don't think about what's going to happen five years, ten years, fifty years down the road. They want to win elections now, amass money now, live it up now, and blow it up now. They don't think about rebuilding it afterward, whether it's the party or Iraq. The reason only 21 percent of Americans identify as Republican anymore is that on average you can get about a quarter of any group to accept "set it on fire and start again" as a strategy for everything from economics to race relations.
Republicans have been running on fear and anger for 40 years. We have to keep in mind 2008 was just about the only time it didn't work.
Melissa McEwen, who doesn't believe in an afterlife, says: "If I am wrong and Mr. Kemp was right...may he be greeted to it with precisely as much compassion as he showed others during his lifetime." Speaking as a politically progressive Quaker, I dare to believe that he will be greeted with much more, since that's the best that even the very best among us can hope for.
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