Jack Kemp had great hair.

The career of former congressman and cabinet member Jack Kemp, who has died this weekend at 73, illustrates why Newt Gingrich will never become president.





In American politics, you can either be a prophet or you can be a counselor.


Prophets are idea people. Counselors' identities- and status- are tied to their patrons'. Prophets just toss out ideas and make noise for them. Counselors have to help their masters govern and implement. Kemp tried to be both. It didn't work. So has Gingrich, and that won't work, either.


Kemp spent 18 years in Congress, where he had one idea, and it wasn't his. The journalist Jude Wanniski converted Kemp to advocacy of Arthur Laffer's revenue curve, and Kemp pretty much spent the rest of this life dining out on that, and variations of it. Nevertheless, Kemp was a major force in moving the GOP to its present position that with an economic depression looming, the only solution is to cut taxes. In his last years he remained silent about how the Laffer Curve works in a fucked economy.


Waldo met Kemp in 1976 at a seminar for congressional interns, where Kemp trotted out his new-found Laffer Curve enthusiasm, complete with Wanniski there to prompt him. Waldo came away with the sense that Kemp was an attractive, articulate former NFL star who fit well into the jock-turned-pol mold but was otherwise dumb as a box of rocks ("In his memoirs, former Vice President Dan Quaylewrote that at Cabinet meetings, Bush would be irked by Kemp's habit of going off on tangents and not making ''any discernible point.'')


Nothing in the next thirty years changed Waldo's mind, except a certain admiration for how Kemp managed to dodge the gay rights issue after Patrick Buchanan made it the centerpiece of the 1992 GOP convention (His son Jeff has made a post-NFL career as one of the leading gay-bashers in Washington State). After retiring from Congress to run an inept campaign for president in 1988, Kemp served four years in exile as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, where he mostly spouted thousand points of light-ish bromides in aid of the first President Bush's test run of compassionate conservatism. In 1996 he second-chaired the hulling of Bob Dole's campaign for president.

Republicans loved Kemp because he managed just enough maverickyness to let them claim things like his friend Ed Feulner did this weekend:

Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, a Kemp family friend and his former campaign deputy chief of staff, said Kemp's legacy will be his compassion.

''The idea that all conservatives really should regroup around and identify with is that this is not an exclusive club,'' Feulner said. ''Freedom is for everybody. That's what Jack Kemp really stood for.''

In the parallel universe that is Gay Patriot they are lighting candles for the old jock. Go figure.