Quarterbacking the Elephants

It was January 1988 and I was a senior in high school, on a Model United Nations trip in Den Haag (The Hague). We shared a youth hostel with a school from Massachusetts. Hanging out with them one night, I asked them -- being the amateur political scientist that I was -- if they were all Dukakis fans. Oh, no, they replied -- they were all Republicans. Then you must all be for Bush, I inferred. This time the objections were even louder -- no, NO, NO! they insisted. They wanted Jack Kemp. All of them -- male, female, black, white -- nodded in agreement.

I can't say I was too familiar with the former AFL quarterback, then a Representative from western New York, or even that I knew he was running for president. A passionate supply-sider and Ronald Reagan's true ideological heir, Kemp never stood a chance against an incumbent Vice President, not to mention an over-confident televangelist who split the conservative vote.

Kemp, ever the good soldier, would go on to serve in the first Bush administration, somewhat miscast as HUD Secretary, then with Bush's defeat in 1992 he formed a conservative group which nearly everyone saw as a stepping stone to another presidential run. Yet he sat out 1996, and was on nobody's short list when Bob Dole tapped him as his running mate.

It was an inspired choice -- or so it seemed -- and for a few heady days that summer following the convention, the symmetrical Dole-Kemp ticket actually led in several polls. Kemp rallied diehard conservatives to the Republican ticket and it actually seemed like the GOP had a shot against the well-oiled, well-managed Clintonista regime. Here was a candidate who appealed to conservatives without offending liberals, who had legitimate deep roots in two bluish states (CA and NY, which, believe it or not, were still considered somewhat in play in 1996), who had genuine credentials with African-Americans, and who was solidly pro-Life without it being a hallmark of his ideology. Too good to be true -- right?

It was not to be, and although Clinton's re-election was almost inevitable, it could have been closer if Kemp hadn't completely disappeared in the last two months of the campaign. His pitiful peformance against the robotic AlGore in the VP debate that year was unforgivable, and was a signal even to the most devoted Republicans that the election was over.

But Quarterback Jack's most productive days had predated his 1988 campaign and subsequent falterings. He had advocated the Reagan economic agenda with more passion than anyone except perhaps Reagan himself, and set the course for a decade of prosperity and the defeat of Communism. The rest is a footnote. He will be missed.