GOP's Jack Kemp Passes Away

The legislative mind behind Reagan's tax cuts, former Buffalo Bills QB, Poppy Bush's HUD chief and Bob Dole's running mate in 1996, Jack Kemp has passed away from cancer. He was most certainly fiscal conservative (he helped create Reaganomics), but he was something of a social moderate as well. For a Republican Kemp was actually a pretty good guy:

Mr. Kemp was regarded as an unusual sort of Republican, combining fiscal and social conservatism with support for civil rights, affirmative action and rights for illegal immigrants. He called himself "a bleeding-heart conservative."

After becoming HUD secretary in 1988, he worked to root out discrimination by lenders and insurers. He ended some programs, tightened others and energized the staff.

He was an early advocate of plans to attract business to distressed neighborhoods with tax-free zones.

He would be considered a liberal by today's GOP standards.

Football experiences, including rejections encountered by black players in New Orleans for the 1965 AFL All-Star game, fostered Mr. Kemp's recognition that the GOP needed to become more inclusive.

As a Republican congressman, he defied conservatives by pushing sanctions against South Africa. As HUD chief, he put the interests of poor tenants over housing developers. And as a vice presidential nominee, he campaigned hard for African American votes his ticket had little hope of winning.

In many ways Kemp was the original "compassionate conservative". He recognized that government had a role to play in making lives better in America, not as a bogeyman or an adversary.

But it's important to note that if he had still been politically active today however, Jack Kemp would have long been run out of the party for not hating minorities enough, especially illegal immigrants. He would have been considered an out-of-touch pre-9/11 Poppy Bush moderate at best and a "shamnesty traitor" at worst.

The country lost, as BooMan puts it,"a profoundly decent and profoundly wrong man." The Reganomics that he created ultimately led the to recession of 2002 and the current economic crisis of today. Would that the rest of his party choose to emulate his true "big tent" philosophy as an improvement, and learn from his tragic mistakes in creating an economic collapse nearly 30 years in the making.