The last time I saw Jack Kemp, up close, he was on the West Side of Chicago getting a big hug from community activist Gale Cincotta.
It was November of 1989 and Kemp, then secretary of housing in the Bush administration, was touring the low-income Austin neighborhood. Cincotta gave Kemp the affectionate squeeze after he announced his Federal Housing Administration would start selling vacant, FHA-repossessed clunkers to Cincotta’s rehab group at a deep discount.
The memory flashed after I heard that Bob Dole, to the surprise of the experts, had picked Kemp as his vice-presidential running mate. It didn’t surprise me. I’ve long regarded Kemp as the fastest horse in the GOP stable, and I still don’t understand why he decided not to run for the top of the ticket. Maybe it was insufficient funds. Or that he figured Dole was a lock.
In any case, his coming aboard as No. 2 makes Campaign ’96 a whole new ball game in my book. And here’s why: Nobody, and I mean nobody, is better at selling the new Republican gospel of urban liberation. If Kemp is given his “head” by the Dole campaign (a big “if,” since they’re already trying to remold Kemp’s progressive views on immigration and affirmative action) the former pro quarterback will pick off urban Democrats by the hundreds of thousands.
He is that good.
He is also wrong in much of what he has to say about urban problems, but that’s just my personal view. This scrawler, after all, is no Jack Kemp. I could never stand up before a racially-mixed audience of big-city officials–people who generally think Republicans are out to starve cities out of existence–and deliver a speech that in 20 minutes has those same people cheering and stomping with approval. Jack Kemp does this for a living. And he makes it look easy.
I watched him do it once in Atlanta, at a convention of the National League of Cities. There were 2,000 local officials there from burgs big and small, and a lot of them were angry about GOP-inspired cutbacks in federal aid to cities. Not to worry, Kemp told them. Such monetary assistance from Washington, and the rules that go with it, are the cause of their problem, not the solution. What cities, and the poor people who live in them, really need, Kemp said, is to be liberated from government.
Liberation is a powerful word. Everyone wants to be liberated. And none want to be liberated more than urban blacks, whose ancestors came here in chains, and who now find themselves chained by mean circumstance. I saw Kemp’s liberation rhetoric moved some African-Americans to tears.
By now his themes are familiar. If only government would remove its taxes and regulation, if only the powers of free enterprise and entrepreneurship were unleashed in the neighborhoods that need them the most, then there would be a new day for America’s troubled cities.
“The entrepreneurial democratic system is the greatest anti-poverty weapon the world has ever seen,” Kemp thundered toward the end of that Atlanta speech, triggering an umpteenth roar of applause.
Afterwards I approached him and we talked until the two of us were the only ones left in the ballroom. I had lots of questions. What made him think private capital would flow into destitute neighborhoods once the government backed off? Wasn’t it a lack of private investment that prompted the government to get involved in the first place? And how were the unemployed in those neighborhoods to get the education, training and start-up cash needed to remake themselves into entrepreneurs?
Jack Kemp came right back with answers to those questions, and more. I still think his proposals–including the “enterprise zone” concept he pushed as a congressman–are a gross over-simplification of both problem and solution. But that day, in Atlanta, he rebutted my skepticisms with sincerity, enthusiasm and good cheer. I like the guy.
So does Gail Cincotta, who is still working on housing issues both in the Austin neighborhood and around the country as founder-director of the National Training and Information Center.
It’s not news to Cincotta that the federal government can destroy a neighborhood. She became famous during the 70s battling the aforementioned FHA, which was greasing the skids under neighborhoods by issuing federally-insured mortgages to people who couldn’t make the payments. But she also saw that the private sector will turn its back on certain neighborhoods, which is why she led the fight against mortgage and credit red-lining–a fight that produced the federal Community Reinvestment Act.
“Jack Kemp did fine by us when he was housing secretary,” Cincotta told me last week, adding with a just a hint of derision that the Clinton administration has stopped discounting those FHA-foreclosed houses. “Besides, I like him personally,” she said. “He’s got so much energy, you just can’t believe it.”
So I asked her if she would consider voting Republican this time around.
“I haven’t made up my mind,” said Cincotta, a neighborhood folk hero if there ever was one.
All of which ought to make Bill Clinton sit up and take notice. The incumbent president might think he has the urban vote in his pocket, but my hunch is that more than a few city-philes are about to be “liberated” by Jack Kemp.
