By Rudy Grahn
(YBH) – Jack Kemp was the main reason I voted Republican in the Presidential election of 1996, the last time I voted Republican for any national office. I considered (and consider) Bob Dole to be a man of honor, and looking back, I certainly feel that having a President Dole, nearly a year into a second term, on 9/11/01 would likely have been the best possible scenario for our nation in the aftermath of that event, but that wasn’t to be. President Clinton’s run from the center as a “New Democrat” was sufficiently believable to enough people then that the GOP couldn’t allow itself to be perceived as too far away from the comfortable middle themselves.
By and large, the GOP ticket did try running from the center, and I bought the sale, doing so after considerable comparison shopping. It was only my third Presidential election, and I was a young political junkie with enough personal conservatism to find voting for the GOP natural – I had even registered as a Republican. At my Iowa caucus, I first stood for Steve Forbes because he struck me as a “New Republican” of the sort I could back – fiscal conservatism and a ‘live and let live’ policy on the other stuff. I was young.
In the end. Dole’s people had my caucus sewn up before it even started (which is the way to win an Iowa Caucus), so after I, and the one other young man there, stood for Mister Forbes and saw there was no hope, I went over to the Dole camp. I did it because I liked Jack Kemp. I liked Jack Kemp less for the particulars on each issue, but more for what I saw as an ability to retain fidelity to principles without letting dogma obscure the bigger issues. Jack Kemp looked for ways to apply his principles beyond the narrow sphere of pet issues or his party’s agenda, believing that the merits of his approach would be borne out in the results even when the situation was based on very un-Republican assumptions. The issue which caused me to take him seriously and support him was his approach to Affirmative Action.
The history of the 1996 campaign has been written so as to make it appear that Jack Kemp and Bob Dole were at loggerheads over Affirmative Action, but I think framing it that way overstates the case, and in doing so, highlights how the dogmatists have painted the GOP into a corner. Bob was certainly ‘against’, but Jack wasn’t ‘for’ Affirmative Action in the way that the liberals are said to be, though it is often implied that he was. Jack Kemp understood that Affirmative Action wasn’t the end, but a means; it is a prescribed solution for a diagnosed problem. What Jack Kemp was ‘for’ was acknowledging that the problem was real and that it needed to be solved, even if the context neither favors the right nor is of the right’s choosing. His gift was for seeing that the problem represented a big potential win for conservative thought if market-focused solutions could be brought forward as a counter-proposal to quotas and judicial remedy. He knew that the right had a legacy of being seen as the antagonist behind the problem and saw little zeal on the right for trying to reframe the question, but he was wise enough to know you can’t just ignore such questions to make them go away, nor should you want to when you can turn the problem into an opportunity to have your principles applied and proven-out.
With greater support from the right, the idea of the Empowerment Zone and other market-centric approaches to bigger social problems had incredible upside for broadening the appeal of the Republican Party. If nothing else, it would have been a way to show that they sought to represent the interests of all Americans, even when those interests fall outside of traditional areas of strength. Making the killing off of Affirmative Action the full extent of their interest in the problem is precisely how the stereotypes of the GOP developed, and to my mind, not unfairly. Jack Kemp seemed to understand the perception that approach created and advocated a better idea. To be quite sure, the gesture matters, but more importantly, in time, the chance to implement solutions and actually solve problems would come, and the track record could well be established – the kind of track record that makes the idea of “Compassionate Conservatism” seem a viable, real-world approach to problem-solving rather than the cynical bit of positioning it became.
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Rudy Grahn Jr. is a former talk show host turned writer turned analyst who currently writes primarily on the personal on his weblog Rudayday.com. Rudy is also a digital photographer whose work has been featured on PBS, NBC, and web outlets like BoingBoing.com and The Morning News. His nickname “Rudayday” was conferred upon him by John Romano in the 20th Century. Rudy Grahn article archive.
