The Jack Kemp revival

AMERICAN football “combines two of the worst things in American life”, said George Will, a baseball fan. “It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” That sounds like good training for politics, so it is odd that so few football stars have won high office. Jack Kemp, a quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, was an exception. He became a Republican congressman, an ideas man for the Reagan revolution and, in 1996, vice-presidential running mate to Senator Bob Dole. Now, long after his retirement from elected politics and five years after his death Kemp is enjoying a revival, with tributes and name-checks from Republicans who believe that the party must broaden its appeal, notably among the young, women, Hispanics, blacks and other voter blocs who suspect that the American Dream may be a mirage.

In a way, this is a surprise. In his heyday Kemp was a radical, fighting a consensus in favour of big government and high taxes. Slash taxes and the Treasury will actually collect more money, Kemp and his allies predicted, as the economy creates new wealth and jobs—doing more to lift up the poor than any bossily bureaucratic welfare scheme. (“Voodoo economics”, sniffed the elder George Bush). Kemp could be a bit relentless: even friends admit they sometimes ducked down another congressional corridor when they heard him coming.

But a quarterback’s charisma saved him, buttressed by his palpable, heart-on-sleeve compassion. Even opponents were disarmed by his willingness to preach the joys of free enterprise in union halls, black community meetings or urban housing projects. Many saw a link to his sporting years. As congressional colleagues joked: “Jack Kemp has showered with more black men than most Republicans meet in a lifetime.”

A central Kemp idea was eliminating tax traps that squeeze the poor if they move from welfare into work. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a putative contender for the 2016 presidential nomination, has some very Kempian ideas about simplifying welfare programmes and using wage subsidies to make work pay. Mr Rubio has also backed immigration reforms that would bring millions out of the shadows. Kemp, an immigration advocate who battled nativists in his party, would surely have cheered (and sympathised when Mr Rubio endured a backlash from the right).

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, another 2016 prospect, has pushed low-tax, deregulated “economic freedom zones” for such blighted cities as Detroit, proudly calling them a version of an old Kemp scheme, but “on steroids”. Representative Paul Ryan, the 2012 vice-presidential candidate, has called Kemp a “mentor” since landing a job, aged 23, at a think-tank Kemp founded. Of late Mr Ryan has been spending time deep in Kemp territory, visiting church-run anti-poverty schemes in minority neighbourhoods.

Such moves to expand the party’s appeal mark a break with the tin-eared 2012 Republican presidential campaign of Mitt Romney (whose team discouraged Mr Ryan from addressing Hispanic and black audiences, an insider sighs). That campaign reached an un-Kempian nadir when Mr Romney was caught on tape at a donors’ dinner, dismissing the 47% of Americans who paid no federal income taxes as “dependent” on government and never likely to vote Republican. Not only were Mr Romney’s remarks politically disastrous; he overlooked the fact that it was a long-standing conservative goal, championed by Kemp and Ronald Reagan, to remove low-earners from the tax rolls.

Yet today’s Kemp revival is selective. In 1988 he failed to win the Republican presidential nomination and he would flunk a party primary today, suggests Mort Kondracke, co-author of a forthcoming Kemp biography. As a hawkish cold warrior, he would loathe the pull-up-the-drawbridge foreign policies favoured by Mr Paul and the isolationist right. A self-styled “bleeding-heart conservative”, Kemp angered colleagues by arguing against cuts in social spending in hard economic times. Growth takes care of deficits, he argued, warning his party against being “green-eyeshade” types obsessed with austerity.

Explaining why he differs from his former mentor on this, Mr Ryan points out that Kemp worked in an age when far smaller sums went on pensions, health care for the old and other social transfers, and deficits were less of a worry. Mr Ryan, a more austere fiscal conservative, calls himself a “second-generation supply-sider”, living in a “more difficult” age.

What really draws today’s Republicans to Kemp is an attitude of mind. Mr Ryan hails his old friend for representing an inclusive, “confident” strand of conservatism. Without naming names, Mr Ryan draws a contrast with “insecure” conservatives, focused on “purifying the ranks and burning heretics, rather than on winning converts”. Will Kempian confidence win the day? For the Republicans’ sake, it had better.

Don’t fear the voters

Kemp called the Republicans “America’s natural governing party”—as long as they were willing to compete to defend their ideas. Americans, he warned conservatives, can lose trust in a majority party, if that majority party “loses faith in democracy”. Old friends hear a sportsman speaking. Kemp was smallish for a modern quarterback, notes Senator Dan Coats of Indiana: he succeeded through strength of will, first in football, then in politics. David Hoppe, a former Kemp aide, quotes a favourite dictum: “Jack used to say, if we have better ideas, we will win.”

Today’s Republicans should pay heed. Too many boast that America is a majority centre-right country—only to turn round and enthuse about low-turnout mid-term elections, in which the young, the poor and minorities are less likely to vote. Worse, too many Republican state governments seem drawn to policies that shrink the electorate, from purging felons from voter rolls to curbing early voting. No sports team would long thrive if it ran from free and fair competition. Why should politics be different?