Jack Kemp passed away last night of cancer. He was a meaningful politician, along the lines of a Henry Clay and he will be remembered for changing tax policy direction in the United States.

I wanted to relay a brief story of media bias with regards to Jack Kemp, one that I never forgot. I was a junior in High School during the 1988 presidential election, and living in Massachusetts, I got to see all the news coverage and television ads directed at southern New Hampshire for the New Hampshire primary taking place that year. The candidates that year were George Bush, Bob Dole (who had won Iowa), Jack Kemp, Alexander Haig, Donald Rumsfeld, and some even lesser known politicians. The major candidates were obviously Bush who was Vice President at that time, Dole who was the minority leader in the Senate, and Kemp, who had been the philosophic force behind the Reagan economic policies.

I had felt that Kemp was the natural heir to the Reagan revolution, that Bush was basically an old guard country club Republican whom Reagan had put on the ticket just to keep it united, and that Dole was a farm belt agribusiness Senator who had no real ideological connection to what had occurred in Washington over the last eight years. Kemp, author of the Kemp Roth tax cuts, was the natural heir to the Republican mantle.

So Bush was ahead in the polls in New Hampshire, by like 10 points. He had like 27% in the polls. This was due in no small measure to his own New England roots and due to having lined up the New Hampshire establishment behind him. I remember one channel in particular, reviewing the poll numbers, splitting the results onto two screens, as if to say “here are the real candidates” and “here are all the cranks.” The poll numbers were Bush 27%, Dole 17%, Kemp 16%, and the next nearest was under 10%. Naturally, they put the split between Dole and Kemp.

Got that? Dole and Kemp were basically tied in New Hampshire, but Kemp got the crackpot treatment, for reasons that I think were obvious; namely that the MSM wanted to bring back old-guard Republicans and bury the new guard as quickly as they could. Kemp represented a continuation of what Reagan had started, the others clearly did not. So Kemp got lumped in with Haig, Rumsfeld, Paul Laxalt, and Harold Stassen.

So I just wanted to memorialize Kemp here, and let whomever know that I, at least, remember what happened in New Hampshire in 1988. Frankly, I think both Bushes were bad for the country and disastrous for the Republican Party, and it sickens me to think back to 1988 and consider where we could have been today if Kemp had been given a fair hearing during that primary.

Tags: Jack Kemp

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