Jack Kemp caused a mild stir this past week when he endorsed Steve Forbes for President the day after Bob Dole swept Junior Tuesday and re-established himself as the undisputed front- runner for this year's GOP presidential nomination. To the casual observer, Kemp's actions appeared to make little political sense. After a lot of thought, accompanied by considerable feelings of regret at his dilatory actions in this regard, I've come to the disturbing conclusion that Kemp followed this course of action for very demeaning calculated motives that dealt with the conflicting tugs of political expediency and personal demands.
To begin with, it is obvious that this endorsement was not intended to help Steve Forbes in any way in his presidential quest. It was the disingenuous fulfillment of a careless personal pledge he made to support Forbes should Forbes decide to plunge into the presidential sweepstakes. It is equally obvious that Kemp never expected matters to proceed far enough for him to be forced to follow through on his careless words. It appears that he forgot that someone's word is or should be his bond.
Second, it is important to note that by timing his endorsement in the cockamamy manner which he has, he has ensured that Dole will remain TOTALLY UNDAMAGED. And this is an important consideration, apparently, for Jack Kemp. Kemp caused quite a commotion last year within his party when he opposed Prop 187, and showed up on Jesse Jackson's show touting the virtues of racial inclusion for the GOP. Both of those acts were politically courageous and principled, and Kemp paid for them dearly. He consequently lost a lot of support in his party, and abruptly decided, as a result, that any attempt on his part to win this year's GOP presidential nod would be futile. Since then, he seems to have lost his nerve. He is drawing in his horns, and appears to be anxious to shed his boatrocking image. But then of course his mouth got him into trouble in a private personal conversation, one with his fellow Empower America member, Steve Forbes.
So what did Jack do?
First, he continually fobbed off Forbes' desperate attempts to pressure him to follow through on his thoughtless commitment. By postponing, delaying, evading, and prevaricating, he managed to put off an endorsement until the campaign train had effectively passed Forbes by. If Kemp had been serious about supporting Forbes and fighting for his nomination, the time for him to have issued his endorsement would have been directly following Forbes' Arizona win, when, as discussed here in the Poll Corner, he managed to win upset victories over Bob Dole in Delaware and Pat Buchanan in Arizona. But if he had issued the endorsement at that time, Forbes would have received a crucial shot in the arm going into Colorado, Connecticut, and New York, and the face of this whole campaign might have been different. That was something Fighting Jack Kemp could not afford. Above all, he had his political hide to think about. As someone desperately trying to get back into the good graces of a party establishment furious with him because of his flirtation with ethnic and racial tolerance, something not too popular in today's GOP, our football legend could not afford to be perceived as one of the catalysts for a possible defeat of that party establishment's annointed mouthpiece. So he stayed true to his word to Forbes by at least not endorsing Dole, but waited till King Bob was firmly on his throne and could probably not be derailed or defeated before finally following through on his promise, and saying words for his friend which by now were completely useless. Way to go, Jack. Your allegiance to principle is breathtaking.
Not that Steve Forbes' defeat is anything to cry about. Here is someone who may or may not be pro-life, but if he is he sure doesn't have the guts to say so. Here is someone who, after having been whipped by the theocrats for his apostasy in Iowa when he dared to criticize the Christian Coalition, now touts his support for school prayer. Here is someone who blindly advocates the same supply-side, tax cut bromides that gave us in the eighties chronically unbalanced budgets for decades, and handed us a debt that our children and our children's children will be paying off for the foreseeable future.
I suppose we can be grateful that he has loosened the hinges somewhat on the door to Fortress D'Amato in the fiefdom of New York, though one must recognize that his credentials as a political reformer are new-minted, to put it mildly. And he is one of the few candidates who is stressing support for term limits. He has also paid obeisance to the kinder gentler Empower America-style conservatives in the party by opposing Prop 187. But a nomination victory for Forbes, while very unlikely at this point, would not be the victory for moderation and enlightenment that some opponents of the GOP establishment appear to believe.
For true principle and courage in the Republican party, that would presage an era of intelligent reform and forward thinking in that institution, one has to look at people like Pete Domenici, who really BELIEVES in the concept of a balanced budget, to the extent that he has opposed the tax cut monstrosity Gingrich pushed in his Contract on America. He also opposed the $7 billion defense increase that Strom Thurmond and his flag-waving house buddies pushed. At the same time, this man is genuinely pro-life, and an old-fashioned conservative, not a nihilist reactionary of the sort that has hijacked the GOP in recent years. If Domenici, or someone of his ilk, like Judd Gregg, or John Warner, had emerged as the moderate alternative to Dole, you would have seen a battle where the Kemp and/or Weld wing of the Republican party would have been happy to have taken sides and supported that alternative, but that option, if victorious, would have meant a real positive difference, and improvement, for the GOP compared to where it stands now.
Another superb example of a moderate conservative alternative, whose values, if victorious, would have made a difference for the better in the GOP, in terms of not only platform fights, but rhetorical emphasis, is Senator John McCain. Again, we have here a genuine, straightforward conservative. This man favors spending reductions to balance the budget as many others in his party do, but, unlike many in his party, among his proposals are severe cuts in the defense budget; he is a strong opponent of the B2; he strongly supported Clinton's decision to normalize relations with Vietnam, over the objections of the jingoists and demagogues like Dornan and Cunningham in the House, and he is supporting one of the most impressive and far-reaching political reform packages pushed by any major political figure in recent years, the Feingold/McCain/Smith campaign finance reform bill. Here again, we have a genuine conservative who still manages to offer thoughtful, open-minded, creative thinking in a party which increasingly seems to encourage none of those things.
Yet instead of thoughtful conservative thinking that shows a willingness to be independent and to step on a few toes of the establishment, our only alternative to Bob Dole is Steve Forbes, who has done little to show spine and independence other than mouth support for term limits, and trash ALL of his opponents in slick attack ads.
As I write this Saturday night, Bill Schneider on CNN is reporting that Kemp's motivation for endorsing Forbes is to keep the flat tax alive for this summer's GOP platform fight. As the man most singularly associated with his party's growth wing, Kemp, according to Schneider, feels uniquely obligated to keep that intellectual flame burning. Schneider claims that Kemp is stating the absolute truth when he claims that seeing the flat tax trashed by Dole and D'Amato this past week, during the New York primary campaign, made him decide he could be silent no longer. Sorry, Bill, I don't buy it. The flat tax has been trashed consistently for weeks; at a time when he was riding high, and was viewed as having considerable potential influence within the party, Governor Lamar Alexander dared to call the Forbes proposal "nutty." As a result of those attacks, Forbes started deflating in Iowa and New Hampshire; why didn't Kemp endorse him then?
Two days ago, Kemp offered yet another explanation on Larry King. He mentioned the fact that up until last Monday he was still crossing the Ts and dotting the Is on his tax commission report. It strains credulity that he found himself freed from obligation on the very day Dole virtually wrapped up the nomination. Sorry, folks; Kemp just plain lost the stomach for a real fight, and his eleventh hour discovery of principles which he has fought for all his life is a pathetic reminder of that sad fact.
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