Jack Kemp

WASHINGTON — “Today,” Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond said on the Senate floor a few minutes ago, “Jack serves as a role model, I believe, for the future of our party.”

Bond, R-Mo., was speaking of Jack Kemp, the prominent Republican who died of cancer at his home in suburban Washington on Saturday. He was 73.

Since his death, tributes have poured forth about Kemp, the high-profile former football star and national political figure who liked to refer to himself as “a bleeding-heart conservative.”

Some of the tributes recalled reasons that Kemp and his worldview flourished over several decades in Washington.

As Bond noted: ”Jack was well-known for saying that the best way to oppose a bad idea is to oppose it with a good one.”

That advice, in itself, might be considered by those who have saddled the GOP with the “Party of No” label for unrelenting opposition to a lot of what is being talked about in Washington these days without offering appealing alternatives.

Kemp was a favorite of minorities, and not just because he enjoyed the company of people of all races. While remaining true to his conservative beliefs, he was a crusader for urban programs and creating opportunities for people who had few. He was especially vocal in sounding alarms about threats from lead-based paint in urban housing.

Kemp was a fierce opponent of hard-edged immigration policies, a stance some Republicans might want to review given the ongoing threats to their party from demographic changes.

He was an apostle of flat-rate taxation – which both parties might consider — and, like many devotees of supply-side economics in the 80s and 90s, he argued that budget deficits should not be a significant worry in pursuit of other goals.

Rather, he used to say, the overriding concern of economic policy is growth.

Kemp relished working across the aisle with Democrats. His progressive idea for empowerment zones — giving tax incentives and bonding authority to depressed areas — didn’t get far federally when he was George H.W. Bush’s HUD secretary.

But soon they were adopted around the country — including in St. Louis — and Bill Clinton provided several billion dollars to make them work when he became president.

Harking back to the time when Republicans and Democrats worked together better, Kemp had many Democrats as friends, among them Al Gore. (Some Republicans grumbled that their friendship was why Kemp barely attacked Gore in their VP candidate debate in 1996.)

Nor was Kemp fond of battling the news media, fashionable in some quarters today. Rather, Kemp preferred persuading reporters of the value of his ideas, (something Post-Dispatch correspondents enjoyed when Kemp had his DC office a few floors above ours for several years.)

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