We're going to need another Jack Kemp. We're in the same mess now as we were when he rose to prominence in the 1970s: rising taxes, energy rationing, and a misguided belief that we can counter all of that with the printing press. We're going to need someone who can understand the fundamental truth of the Laffer Curve, and still has the charisma to lead men and women in the political sphere.
I owe Jack Kemp a lot--we all do. His supply-side optimism helped supplant the near-universal conservative pan-gloomism of the '70s. George Gilder wrote the book, and Reagan won the White House, but before both of them, Kemp cracked the code. Kemp took the groundbreaking and brilliant work of Art Laffer and Robert Mundell and turned it into a real political movement and real-world legislation (and rescued it from becoming a Jude Wanniski cult). Kemp helped Reagan to convert from Goldwater-root-canal-high-tax-low-deficit economics and gave the GOP a new lease on life.
Kemp should have been the successor, but the Bush dynasty pulled their many strings and won the White House, and the party lost something. The Republicans have wandered in the economic wilderness, to some degree, ever since. Bush Sr. governed as a Keynesian. So did Clinton, in his first term. In his second term, Clinton governed as a supply-sider. Bush Jr. never really had it clear in his mind: demand-side tax cuts in 2001, supply-side tax cuts in 2003, Sarbanes-Oxley financial strangulation, car-crushing CAFE standards, mark-to-market, bailouts--a mixed supply-side legacy at best.
Now, as everybody and their brother tells us that the only way for the GOP to get back on top again is to stop all this tax-cutting and supply-side growth stuff, it is worth asking whether the Kemp/Reagan formula is obsolete.
I, for one, do not believe that it is.
The main thing about Kempism is that it actually worked. What the big-government conservatives can't see from their perches at think tanks and newspapers is reality. Central planning doesn't work. I don't care about the emerging voting patterns of bo-bos (David Brooks' "bohemian bourgeois"). I don't care if the lawyers and nonprofit executives who live in their planned communities hate Sarah Palin and swoon at Barack Obama. I don't care about any of that, because politics is not the final word; reality is. That's what Kemp got, and so many in the party now do not.
The central planning political consensus was at least as strong in the 1970s as it is now. David Frum should know that: He wrote a fine history of that awful decade. I'm sure that if there had been blogs back then, Washington conservatives would have told us how out of touch Kemp (and Reagan) were with the political consensus, and they would have been right. But they would have been wrong, too, because in the end, the political consensus does not rule the land; reality does.
Foreign affairs and terror prevention were incredibly passé in the years leading up to Sept. 11, 2001. No one wanted to talk about that stuff. Books about it did not sell. Then, reality caught up with our Utopian illusion: Indifference didn't work in defending us against the jihadists. More handcuffs on the CIA and the FBI than on the terrorists in the name of civil liberties didn't work, either. Reality won again, and the political consensus lost.
