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"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 |
Jack Kemp - Former NFL Quarterback, 9-Term Republican Congressman, Cabinet Officer and Vice-Presidential Candidate - has succumbed to cancer at 73.
Jack Kemp wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, intellectually, but he had well-honed political instincts that served him and his party well through several administrations. An original advocate of a"Big-Tent" party that would accommodate diverse groups of voters, he saw the devepopment of an increasingly exclusive, rather than inclusive, organization that has resulted in the narrow, purist, regional party of 2008-9.
His legacy includes the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut of the 1980s. A cheerleader for supply-side economics (or "Reaganomics") he promoted a Laffer Curve view that tax cuts spur economic growth and reduce deficits.
Although Kemp was a social conservative, opposed to abortion rights, his libertarian philosophies of tolerance and individual rights and his commitment to supporting minorities, women, blue-collar workers and organized labor clashed with conservative voters' social and religious values.
