After graduating from a Division III college, normally an athletic platform roughly equivalent to MIT’s, he made it into professional football with the upstart American Football League.  Despite being built like a normal person (5′ 10″, 175), he flourished for a decade, winning two AFL titles and one AFL MVP award. 

Gaining an appreciation for the American black experience?  Kemp on the run

Kemp was, I think, the first American who rode sports success into politics.  Nowadays we think nothing of having Jim Bunning in the Senate, or Steve Largent and J. C. Watts in the House – back in 1971, for a football to win elective office was either a joke or a novelty (and, as Jesse The Brain Ventura later showed us in Minnesota, sometimes too much a novelty) – but his real success, at least in housing, was his single term as HUD Secretary under President Bush 41.

“Pro football gave me a good perspective. When I entered the political arena, I had already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, traded, and hung in effigy.” – Jack Kemp, 1996

Not to mention, “chewed out by the best”

Kemp’s predecessor was the narcoleptic Samuel Pierce, on whose soap-opera-fueled watch HUD experienced its worst scandals ever (and that is saying something), and he entered the building, under Pierce’s tenure as a place for being quietly irrelevant, in much the manner of the Tasmanian Devil in a  Bugs Bunny cartoon.  He was a whirlwind of ideas, including:

1. Reorientation of public housing toward residents as principal customers. 

2. Lobbying for an American version of UK stock transfer.  Kemp promoted Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE), under which public housing would be sold to tenants.  (Congress appropriated only a tenth of what he sought.)

3. Creation of Empowerment Zones.

4. Welfare reform with a temporary rent-increase freeze for people who get jobs, to get them out of the means-testing poverty trap.

“Uh oh, the Secretary’s got another idea.”

Himself entirely self-made, Kemp believed in the universality of aspiration – that anyone could make more of his life, and everyone should have the chance to make more of his life.  Government should create opportunity, insist on personal responsibility, and be intolerant of indifference.  Kemp entered a Republican Party dominated by a country-club ethos, where homilies about personal responsibility could serve as a cloaking device for bigotry and indifference.  Kemp would have none of that; he often joked that he’d showered with more black men than many of his colleagues had ever met.  Along with Newt Gingrich, who was and is far more inflammatory and confrontational, Kemp was a driving voice that the Party of Lincoln should be the Party of Responsibility and the natural party of aspiring immigrants.  In this he was the beacon for other Californians as diverse as Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

A man who never lost his enthusiasm: Kemp and Henry Cisneros

Kemp’s successor at HUD was Henry Cisneros, a charismatic former mayor of San Antonio who represented the new breed of housers – Hispanic, technocratic, rising up from the municipal level.  When Cisneros too left office, Kemp and he forged an intellectual bipartisan tag team on numerous urban policy issues, creating a National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, and co-authoring a book with Cisneros (and Kent Colton of the NAHB, plus AHI affiliate and Harvard JCHS chair Nic Retsinas), Our Communities, Our Homes, advocating continued reinvestment in affordable housing in cities. 

Available from JCHS

Beyond HUD, Kemp championed a flat tax, personal retirement savings (hence the Kemp-Roth IRA), and legal immigration.  He actively advocated free-market reforms in Africa.

Over his years in public service, Kemp grew on me.  At first I thought him a wild man, impractical and prone to firing off ideas without thinking about their achievability.  Over time I find that so much of what he advocated, I’ve embraced as sound policy, even if I’ve used different approaches to turn the ideas from the realm of the conceivable to the realm of the implemented. 

Really, he’s paying close attention!
Jack Kemp and DAS – October, 2005, Harvard’s Kennedy School

Really, he’s paying attention!
Senator Barack Obama and Jack Kemp, 2006 

In a curious way, long-time New York foe Senator Charles Schumer pronounced Kemp’s epitaph twenty years ago, when he said: 

“Good ideas with money can do a whole lot. Good ideas without money aren’t probably going to do a whole lot.” 

Only in America?  Jack Kemp

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