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Date Posted: Sunday, May 03, 2009, 01:32:05am
In reply to:
JB
's message, "(AP) — A spokeswoman says Jack Kemp, a former quarterback, congressman and one-time vice-presidential nominee, has died. (Cancer)" on Saturday, May 02, 2009, 09:42:39pm
Jack Kemp, the quarterback-turned- congressman who contributed early intellectual rigor and a dollop of star power to Republican-led “supply-side” tax cutting in the 1980s, died last night. He was 73.
“Jack Kemp passed away peacefully shortly after 6 o’clock this evening,” Marci Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Kemp family, said by phone yesterday. “During the treatment of his cancer, Jack expressed his gratitude for the thoughts and prayers of so many friends, a gratitude which the Kemp family shares.”
Kemp, a resident of Bethesda, Maryland, disclosed in January 2009 that he was being treated for cancer.
A Republican who represented a blue-collar district, an advocate of racial reconciliation and urban redevelopment along with low taxes, Kemp called himself a “bleeding-heart conservative” and wielded an independent streak that made him hard to label.
For two decades, before, during and after Ronald Reagan’s presidency, he was a field general for tax-cutters in their battles with budget-deficit hawks. Kemp insisted tax cuts provided fuel for government spending, so that the two were not mutually exclusive.
Kemp “was to Reaganomics what Eli Whitney was to mass production,” conservative author William Buckley once wrote.
Kemp represented suburban Buffalo, New York, in Congress from 1971 to 1989, following a football career that ended with the Buffalo Bills. After an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1988, he served four years as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
VP Candidate
When Bob Dole, no hero to tax-cutters, sought to expand his appeal in an uphill challenge to President Bill Clinton in 1996, he picked Kemp as his vice presidential running mate. The selection energized the Republican Party’s tax-cutting wing but couldn’t spare Dole a lopsided loss.
Kemp’s claim to political fame stemmed from his 1977 partnership with Senator William Roth, a Delaware Republican, to propose an across-the-board income-tax reduction of 30 percent over three years.
The Kemp-Roth plan had its origin in Kemp’s discussions with Jude Wanniski, the one-time Wall Street Journal editorial writer who spread the gospel of what he called supply-side economics. That theory held that government could spur growth -- and actually increase the revenue flowing into its coffers -- by cutting marginal tax rates, especially for those who produce goods and services.
‘Tax Gospel’
Throughout the late 1970s, Kemp was “a tireless, itinerant preacher of tax reduction gospel to party audiences, business groups and even labor audiences,” Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote in “The Reagan Revolution” (1981).
Kemp’s message resonated with blue-collar audiences because it promised more economic growth without a tradeoff of fewer government services. As Evans and Novak put it, “For the first time in a half century, a Republican had a positive response to big-government liberalism.”
Reagan adopted Kemp-Roth -- plus three years of breaks on business taxes -- as the economic plan of his triumphant 1980 presidential campaign. The Economic Recovery Tax Act, which Reagan signed in 1981, cut marginal tax rates by 25 percent over three years (Reagan compromised on the final 5 percent) and also lowered capital gains taxes.
Reagan’s budget chief, David Stockman, quickly turned on supply-side economics. He said the benefits would only “trickle down” to the non-wealthy and that Kemp-Roth “was always a Trojan horse” for accomplishing the primary goal, bringing down the top income-tax rate to 50 percent from 70 percent.
True Believer
Kemp, by contrast, remained a true believer.
“A decade of unprecedented job creation, entrepreneurship and prosperity has vindicated our formula for economic growth,” Kemp said at a 1991 celebration of Kemp-Roth sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based conservative organization. “It still astounds me to recall the arrogance with which liberals attacked our proposal to lower tax rates on workers and investors.”
Kemp found a link between his longtime interest in race relations and his passion for tax policy. He said modern-day black entrepreneurs deserved the same low taxes that were in place when the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Mellons made their fortunes.
He supported statehood for the District of Columbia and worked with the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.
Football Hero
Jack French Kemp was born on July 13, 1935, in Los Angeles, the third of four boys. His mother, Frances, was a social worker. His father, Paul, ran a small trucking company.
He majored in physical education and was a football star at Occidental College in Los Angeles, graduating in 1957.
Kemp’s pro football career began slowly. Drafted by the Detroit Lions of the National Football League, he was cut before the 1957 season began, then went on to play four games with the Pittsburgh Steelers. After a year in the U.S. Army, he joined the Calgary Stampeders in the Canadian Football League. He returned to the U.S. in 1960, joining the Los Angeles Chargers, then part of the American Football League, one year before the team relocated to San Diego.
The Bills, also part of the AFL, signed him in 1962. Kemp played in every game for Buffalo from 1963 through 1969, leading the team to the league championship in 1964 and 1965. He retired in 1969 as one of the young franchise’s first true stars.
Politics Beckons
Kemp co-founded the AFL’s player union and served as its president for five years. He worked as a special assistant to Reagan -- then California’s governor -- in 1967, and for the Republican National Committee in 1969.
He ran for Congress in 1970 in the New York congressional district that included suburban Buffalo, a traditionally Democratic area where Kemp, a Republican, was a hero from his football days.
In Congress, Kemp “came to believe that government was overtaxing productive (i.e. rich) people -- killing the geese that laid the golden eggs,” according to a profile in the Almanac of American Politics.
Kemp sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, calling for free trade, returning the U.S. to the gold standard and deploying Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. He won just 39 delegates and finished fourth behind George H.W. Bush, who went on to win the presidency.
Kemp’s legendary verbosity and lack of discipline contributed to his poor showing. “Jack was a totally unmanageable candidate,” Ed Rollins, one of his campaign consultants, wrote in a memoir. “I call it the quarterback mentality. Quarterbacks always think they can make the big play and resent being controlled by anyone.”
Enterprise Zones
As Bush’s HUD secretary from 1989 to 1993, Kemp became a leading supporter of urban “enterprise zones,” which used tax breaks to lure businesses to inner cities. A better advocate than nuts-and-bolts implementer, Kemp failed to get enterprise zones enacted. (Only under Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, did Congress create a federal version of the program that had begun at the state and local levels.) Nor could Kemp win approval of his idea to sell public housing units to the tenants living in them.
Kemp opted against a second run for president in 1996 but asserted himself in making sure tax cuts remained high on the Republican agenda. He did that by endorsing Steve Forbes and his flat-tax proposal even as Dole was closing in on clinching the Republican presidential nomination.
Still, Dole tapped Kemp as his running mate in an attempt to close a 20 percentage point deficit to Clinton in polls. The Dole-Kemp team went on to lose by 8.5 percentage points.
Kemp was founder and chairman of Washington-based Kemp Partners, a consulting firm.
He and his wife, Joanne, whom he met in college and married in 1958, had four children and 17 grandchildren. Their sons both played professional quarterback, Jim in the CFL, Jeff for 11 seasons in the NFL.
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