Kemp Is Dancing Alone in the Backfield of Politics

Jack Kemp seems to have sprung from Ronald Reagan’s id; though he has been a congressman from upstate New York for 17 years, on the national stage he represents Reagan’s unconscious.

A President Kemp would give the country the government Reagan wants to give it but can’t. He would, for example, renominate Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Even after Black Monday revealed Wall Street’s panic over the budget deficit, he would cut, not raise, taxes, and damn the deficit. He would not sign the INF treaty with the Soviets. He would, however, deploy elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative as early as possible, and damn the anti-ballistic missile treaty. Opposed to the Arias peace plan in Central America, he wants instead to fight communism in Nicaragua to the last Contra; fight it in Angola to the last Angolan rebel; fight it in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mozambique. He would succeed where Reagan failed and write an anti-abortion amendment into the Constitution.

How would he get a Democratic Congress, which is now preventing Reagan from doing some of these things, to go along with this radical agenda? In the same way that Rupert Brooke’s fish deal with the inconvenience of land: “In the world of all their wish / There shall be no more land / Say fish.”

That Kemp’s positions have failed to win him more regard from likely Republican primary voters (“Fading Fast” reads a recent headline about Kemp’s candidacy) shows that the GOP has not lost its collective mind. As a general-election candidate, Kemp has all the makings of the Republican George McGovern, the surest of sure losers.

A different school of thought maintains that Kemp has not caught on because he is too liberal for the party. His calls for bringing blacks, union members and other notionally Democratic voters into the Republican tent, this theory goes, makes your average Republican uncomfortable, because these undesirables would take all the status out of being a Republican.

Yet another theory holds that Kemp, rusticating in his safe suburban Buffalo district (where he wound up his pro football career) year after year, has saved his powder too long. Like Richard Gephardt in the Democratic presidential race, he must buck the old prejudice against members of the lower house running for the presidency. If he had run for the Senate against Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1976, or for governor against Mario Cuomo in 1982, his stature would be greater (assuming he won). Instead he has played the Hamlet of New York politics. Too cautious too long, he is now bold beyond his reputation. A conviction politician like Kemp just can’t afford doubts about his political courage.

When Kemp boasted recently that no candidate would be able to run to his right, he put his finger, I believe, on the fundamental reason for his apparent failure to catch on. The genius of American politics is pragmatism, the only philosophical doctrine invented on these shores. Kemp, once the hero of the American Football League, is a stranger to this all-American doctrine. He is an ideologue on the European model. His approach to public policy may be summed up as, “It’s all very well in practice, but how does it sound in theory?”

Kemp shows how a vulnerable mind can be possessed and inflamed by ideas--specifically, by the idea of supply-side economics, of which he is one of the architects. Reflecting on the lessons of Black Monday, Lawrence Chimermine, the chairman of an economic forecasting concern, had this to say about the supply-side faith: “There was little empirical justification for it at the start, and there is virtually none right now.” Yet in the first debate among the Republican candidates, Kemp stood four-square for deja-voodoo economics.

If Ronald Reagan had not been governor of California for eight years, the voters might have balked at the most ideological candidate ever to seek the presidency. Reagan’s experience reassured them. Kemp has no such resume. He has spent his political life in the permanent Republican minority in the House, safely removed from the responsibilities of power. His ideology is too pure ever to have been violated by experience.

“Every time Kemp goes on about his economic ideas,” a Washington wag has suggested, “all you can think of is (his) degree in physical education.” Kemp, the college and pro quarterback, acts as if he is intellectually insecure. He needs his grand theory about “How the World Works” (to borrow the title of the Bible of supply-side economics) to save him from the burden of thinking with an untested instrument. Psychologically necessary, his attachment to his theory is politically disabling. It throttles his considerable, football-derived, populist appeal. “What is this guy talking about?” people say, as Kemp launches into the supply-side penetralia.

It didn’t have to be this way. Most people--most men, at any rate--would accord instant respect to the judgment of a former pro quarterback. To his judgment, not to his ideas. They’d know he could make tough decisions. They’d value his openness to developments undreamed of in his game plan. They’d admire his savviness, his common sense. And, like Kemp’s Buffalo constituents years ago, they might conclude that there could be worse training for a politician. In other words, Kemp didn’t need theory when he had long since mastered one of the most resonant departments of practice in American life. A President as quarterback is one thing; a President as visionary crank is quite another.