Harold Meyerson: The Return Of Jack Kempism
The president has spoken, and it’s now clear that one of the things Hurricane Katrina washed up from the deep was Jack Kempism.
Jack Kempism is the way the Republican Party has dealt with issues of race and poverty since the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. By definition, the Republican Party since the start of the Reagan presidency doesn’t want to deal with issues of race and poverty, so most of the time Jack Kempism is an ideology on the shelf. Its only fair-weather proponent has been Jack Kemp himself, who has long maintained a genuine concern for the African American poor. It has taken an outbreak of truly foul weather -- a hurricane, a failed response from a Republican-controlled government, a backlash against George W. Bush for his monumental insensitivity and incompetence -- for the Republicans to embrace Jack Kempism. But that’s exactly what Bush did last night.
Kemp, a onetime NFL quarterback, was elected to Congress in the early ’70s and quickly became one of the conservative movement’s leading lights, pushing for tax cuts (even before Reagan), which soon became the party orthodoxy, and empowerment zones for the inner city, which soon became the party rhetoric. In 1989, George Bush Senior appointed Kemp the secretary of the Housing and Urban Development Department, and Bob Dole chose him as his running mate in 1996, chiefly to placate the Gingrich generation of Republicans who viewed Dole as a holdover from the Nixon era and thus suspiciously soft on government.
Problem was, empowerment zones never amounted to much. The zones were established in poverty-stricken, heavily minority areas of cities, and their premise was that by cutting taxes on businesses willing to locate there, lightening the regulations, maybe suspending the minimum wage, the government could kick-start a culture of entrepreneurial small businesses that would end the cycles of poverty. On the whole, however, the normal funders of such enterprises -- banks and other lending institutions -- had scant interest in getting such businesses up and running even under perfect Milton Friedmanite conditions. Inner-city entrepreneurial cultures did arise, of course, but more frequently among immigrant groups, such as Koreans, with a strong entrepreneurial culture and lending institutions of their own.
But Jack Kempism was serviceable to Republicans whether or not it worked, for it was their answer to the allegation that they were indifferent to minority poverty and had no program or vision to combat it. ...
Read entire article at American Prospect
Jack Kempism is the way the Republican Party has dealt with issues of race and poverty since the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. By definition, the Republican Party since the start of the Reagan presidency doesn’t want to deal with issues of race and poverty, so most of the time Jack Kempism is an ideology on the shelf. Its only fair-weather proponent has been Jack Kemp himself, who has long maintained a genuine concern for the African American poor. It has taken an outbreak of truly foul weather -- a hurricane, a failed response from a Republican-controlled government, a backlash against George W. Bush for his monumental insensitivity and incompetence -- for the Republicans to embrace Jack Kempism. But that’s exactly what Bush did last night.
Kemp, a onetime NFL quarterback, was elected to Congress in the early ’70s and quickly became one of the conservative movement’s leading lights, pushing for tax cuts (even before Reagan), which soon became the party orthodoxy, and empowerment zones for the inner city, which soon became the party rhetoric. In 1989, George Bush Senior appointed Kemp the secretary of the Housing and Urban Development Department, and Bob Dole chose him as his running mate in 1996, chiefly to placate the Gingrich generation of Republicans who viewed Dole as a holdover from the Nixon era and thus suspiciously soft on government.
Problem was, empowerment zones never amounted to much. The zones were established in poverty-stricken, heavily minority areas of cities, and their premise was that by cutting taxes on businesses willing to locate there, lightening the regulations, maybe suspending the minimum wage, the government could kick-start a culture of entrepreneurial small businesses that would end the cycles of poverty. On the whole, however, the normal funders of such enterprises -- banks and other lending institutions -- had scant interest in getting such businesses up and running even under perfect Milton Friedmanite conditions. Inner-city entrepreneurial cultures did arise, of course, but more frequently among immigrant groups, such as Koreans, with a strong entrepreneurial culture and lending institutions of their own.
But Jack Kempism was serviceable to Republicans whether or not it worked, for it was their answer to the allegation that they were indifferent to minority poverty and had no program or vision to combat it. ...