Even before Jack Kemp passed away, he was starting to get the Left’s standard treatment of dead conservatives, viz., how much superior they are to living specimens. When Mr. Kemp was the intellectual leader of the Republican Party, I never heard a liberal utter a favorable, or even a neutral, word about him. Now they tell us that they’d stop demonizing the Right if only more of us were like Jack.
I already know what they’ll say about Newt Gingrich 30 or 40 years from now.
This observation, which I’m sure hundreds of others have already proffered, is only the prelude to a Kemp anecdote reported in today’s WSJ Political Diary (which you, too, can have delivered to your e-mailbox for less than eight dollars a month).
By way of background, the writer was 11 years old in 1996, living in a very liberal Philadelphia suburb. His fifth grade social studies class staged a mock Presidential election, in which students took the parts of political figures. He was the only volunteer to understudy Bob Dole.
The Clinton campaign was winning early votes, giving away buckets of “free” Halloween candy. As I approached the first speech I’d ever give in public, my Dad went to the library to help me with research. He came back with Jack Kemp’s vice-presidential acceptance speech from that August, tossing it on the table.
Who was Jack Kemp? Until then, I knew him only as Bob Dole’s campaign buddy. But I started reading and soon threw out what I was going to say. Kemp’s speech inspired me to actually think about ideas and their power in politics. “Our convention is not just the meeting of a party, but a celebration of ideas,” he said. “Our goal is not just to win, but to be worthy of winning.” He used imagery, and not just empty imagery: “Our friends in the other party say the economy is moving forward, and it is. But it is moving like a ship dragging an anchor, the anchor of high taxes, excessive regulation and big government.”
The following week, my opponent, clad in a suit with flour peppered in his hair for that Clinton gray, stood at the podium and promised the moon and the stars. I quoted Kemp. We shook hands, and he left, tossing candy. And, against all suburban odds, the Dole-Kemp ticket won at Fallsington Elementary that year. Thank you, Mr. Kemp.
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