Paul Ryan’s Kemp-Inspired Crusade Against Poverty

By Steve Parkhurst

While I admit to being one of those people that thinks Washington D.C. is incapable of controlling and patrolling itself, and that something like The Liberty Amendments proposed by Mark Levin are in order for us to rein government back in, there is something to be said for the efforts of Congressman Paul Ryan.

This is an interesting story in the Washington Post, or as I prefer to call it, Pravda on the Potomac. Still, this article is pretty well done:

Paul Ryan is ready to move beyond last year’s failed presidential campaign and the budget committee chairmanship that has defined him to embark on an ambitious new project: Steering Republicans away from the angry, nativist inclinations of the tea party movement and toward the more inclusive vision of his mentor, the late Jack Kemp.

Since February, Ryan (R-Wis.) has been quietly visiting inner-city neighborhoods with another old Kemp ally, Bob Woodson, the 76-year-old civil rights activist and anti-poverty crusader, to talk to ex-convicts and recovering addicts about the means of their salvation.

Ryan’s staff, meanwhile, has been trolling center-right think tanks and intellectuals for ideas to replace the “bureaucratic, top-down anti-poverty programs” that Ryan blames for “wrecking families and communities” since Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty in 1964.

Next year, for the 50th anniversary of that crusade, Ryan hopes to roll out an anti-poverty plan to rival his budgetary Roadmap for America’s Future in scope and ambition. He is also writing a book about what’s next for the GOP, recalling the 1979 tome that detailed Kemp’s vision under the subtitle, “The Brilliant Young Congressman’s Plan for a Return to Prosperity.”

Of course, that “1979 tome” was Jack Kemp’s An American Renaissance. But I digress.

Ryan’s new emphasis on social ills doesn’t imply that he’s willing to compromise with Democrats on spending more government money. His idea of a war on poverty so far relies heavily on promoting volunteerism and encouraging work through existing federal programs, including the tax code. That’s a skewed version of Kempism, which recognizes that “millions of Americans look to government as a lifeline,” said Bruce Bartlett, a historian who worked for Kemp and has become an acerbic critic of the modern GOP.

“They want to care,” Bartlett said of Ryan and modern Republicans. “But they’re so imprisoned by their ideology that they can’t offer anything meaningful.” Ryan has explained the difference by noting that the national debt has grown enormously since Kemp ran for president in 1988, nearly doubling as a percentage of the economy.

Kempism. Stay tuned in future months for more on that.

In the mid-1990s, crime and poverty were hot national issues. Kemp was a font of innovative ideas for reviving inner-city commerce, rebuilding public housing and overhauling the welfare system. He was pro-immigration, pro-equal opportunity and, above all, pro-tax cuts, which he viewed as government’s primary tool for promoting growth.

Unlike other Republicans, Kemp also frequently visited black and Hispanic voters and asked them directly for their votes.

Two days after Ryan was introduced as Romney’s running mate, he pushed to do the same. Advisers recall Ryan in workout clothes in a Des Moines Marriott, telling campaign officials in Boston that he had two requests: First, to meet the staff in person. And second, to travel to urban areas and speak about poverty.

No one said no. But with Romney focused relentlessly on Obama’s failure to improve the economy for middle-class Americans, the idea always seemed off-message. “We struggled to find the right timing to dovetail it into our messaging schedule,” Romney strategist Ed Gillespie said via e-mail.

Ryan adviser Dan Senor said Ryan argued that “47 million people on food stamps is an economic failure.” But Ryan did not get clearance to deliver a speech on poverty, his sole policy address, until two weeks before the election.

Great point: “47 million people on food stamps is an economic failure.”

Ryan had sought Woodson’s help with his poverty speech. The two reconnected after the election and began traveling together in February — once a month, no reporters — to inner-city programs supported by Woodson’s Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. In Milwaukee, Indianapolis and Denver, Woodson said, Ryan asked questions about “the agents of transformation and how this differs from the professional approach” of government social workers.

Like Woodson, the programs share a disdain for handouts and a focus on helping people address their own problems. In Southeast Washington, Ryan met Bishop Shirley Holloway, who gave up a comfortable career in the U.S. Postal Service to minister to drug addicts, ex-offenders, the homeless — people for whom government benefits can serve only to hasten their downfall, Holloway said.

At City of Hope, they are given an apartment and taught life skills and encouraged to confront their psychological wounds. They can stay as long as they’re sober and working, often in a job Holloway has somehow created.

“Paul wants people to dream again,” Holloway said of Ryan. “You don’t dream when you’ve got food stamps.”

Trips to Newark and Texas are slated for later this month. Woodson said Ryan has also asked him to gather community leaders for an event next year, and to help him compare the results of their work with the 78 means-tested programs that have cost the federal government $15 trillion since 1964.

The takeaway for Ryan, a Catholic, has been explicitly religious. “You cure poverty eye to eye, soul to soul,” he said last week at the Heritage forum. “Spiritual redemption: That’s what saves people.”

How to translate spiritual redemption into public policy?

If you don’t have goosebumps at this point, what’s wrong with you?

“There’s definitely a feeling that conservatives need to get in this arena,” Winship said. Otherwise, “the voices on the left are going to have the entire conversation to themselves.”

A point Newt Gingrich has been making for many years now, and something we fight against here at GPH. To paraphrase Gingrich, you can’t get real solutions offered if you have two Leftists debating on stage, and Republicans standing off to the side yelling “no!” Conservatives and Republicans have to get into the less comfortable debates and have real discussions with people; start connecting with the community. As Jack Kemp used to say, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Also worth noting before closing, the swipe at the “angry, nativist inclinations of the tea party movement” is both senseless and pointless. It tells me that the Left is worried that Paul Ryan and those few like him may be on to something here. If they aren’t worried, then this was just another swipe at the tea party. You decide.

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NRO: Paul Ryan to Write Book

We love to hear news like this. According to Robert Costa over at National Review Online, Congressman Paul Ryan is working on a book. And, the book appears to be hitting on the themes that we advocate here: renewal, renaissance, the “American idea,” and of course, Ryan’s time spent working with the great Jack Kemp:

So far, Ryan has been doing the writing by himself. The early theme of the draft is a broad discussion of American renewal, with an emphasis on the Republican future and the party’s need to articulate what he calls the “American idea.”

Behind the scenes, Ryan is worried that the GOP is losing its connection with working Americans, and he has been writing about how the party needs to speak more to those in poverty about empowerment and economic freedom. His recent speeches at the American Enterprise Institute’s Kristol dinner and at Benedictine College have touched on this issue, and Ryan is eager to broaden the argument into chapter form.

On a personal level, the book will highlight his childhood in Janesville, Wis., his time as an aide to Jack Kemp, and his rise through the congressional ranks. Kemp, especially, will have a special place in the book, and in many ways, Ryan’s effort will likely echo Kemp’s book, An American Renaissance: A Strategy for the 1980s.

All of a sudden, next year can not get here fast enough.

Jack Kemp Showed GOP How to Appeal to Minorities

Bruce Bartlett has written a very good piece about the late Jack Kemp. I figured it was worth sharing in it’s entirety.

By Bruce Bartlett, The Fiscal Times

On Tuesday, the Jack Kemp Foundation held its annual dinner in honor of the late congressman, HUD secretary and 1996 Republican vice presidential nominee. The two featured speakers were Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Marco Rubio, both of whom cite Kemp as a major influence on their thinking. Both are also thought to aspire to the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

As someone who worked on Kemp’s congressional staff in the 1970s and who followed his thinking carefully until his untimely death in 2009, I agree that his philosophy is one that Republicans should embrace if they hope to ever win the White House again. This is especially the case with regard to the poor, minorities and working class – groups that Mitt Romney denigrated as part of the 47 percent of Americans who only want government to take care of them.

One of the things that Kemp always preached is that there is a difference between government giving people a handout and giving them a hand up. He understood that government had an essential role to play in leveling the playing field. He also understood that workers and minorities need government to intervene on their behalf because the pure free market cannot be depended upon to give them a fair deal.

Kemp always supported workers and labor unions, not surprising given that he was co-founder of a labor union, the American Football League Players Association. Indeed, the very thing that first set Kemp apart from every other Republicans when he was elected to Congress in 1970 was the fact that he actively sought – and received – labor support.

Then, as now, Republicans hated and feared labor unions, viewing them as their mortal enemies. That is why Republicans in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and other states are doing everything in their power to smash both private sector and public employee unions.

Kemp understood that an economic system that does not properly reward workers is not one that can survive. The goal of economic policy should be to raise real wages, he believed. Today, Republicans seem to think that only the well-being of the ultra-wealthy matters for economic progress.

Although Kemp pushed for a cut in tax rates for the wealthy, he was adamant that all workers must share in the benefits of lower taxes. He also focused heavily on the idea that saving, investment, technological advancement and capital formation were the essential goals of economic and tax policy, because they raised productivity, which would raise the wages of workers. Today, Republicans just blithely assume that tax cuts for the wealthy will automatically help the economy without ever explaining how or why.

I believe that Kemp would be truly appalled by the callousness that many Republicans today casually exhibit toward African-Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and other ethnic minorities. He believed that a great political party had to represent all Americans and not just one race, as Republicans essentially now do. I believe he would denounce, in the strongest possible terms, the idea promoted by some on the Republican right, such as Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of racists to discriminate in public accommodations.

I recently spoke with journalist Mort Kondracke, who is working on a biography of Kemp, about Kemp’s deep hatred of racism and any form of discrimination against minorities. He did many things that may appear commonplace today but were acts of courage in the pre-civil rights era of the early 1960s.

For example, Kemp was the first white player to ever room with a black player at the Buffalo Bills. While playing with the San Diego Chargers, Kemp objected when the white players were booked into a nice hotel in Dallas and the black players were relegated to a dumpy hotel far away. Because of his complaints, all the players stayed in a not-so-nice hotel together.

In 1965, Kemp supported a boycott of the AFL All Star game because the site, New Orleans, still enforced segregation in restaurants and other public accommodations. The game was moved to Houston as a result.

I also know that Kemp had a far different attitude toward immigrants than virtually all Republicans today. He welcomed them, seeing immigration as one of the economy’s lifebloods. He would be extremely critical of efforts to demagogue Latino immigrants who come here, legally or illegally, just looking to earn an honest living and enjoy the American way of life.

Kondracke also reminded me of a terrific passage in Kemp’s 1979 book, An American Renaissance. It’s hard to imagine any Republican politician of today writing these words:

When someone’s approach to politics is even slightly undemocratic, as the GOP has been as a party, his outlook becomes elitist and patronizing. For years I have been hearing fellow Republicans…talk about “broadening the party’s base.” This has a nice democratic sound to it. But the programs that flow from the idea are almost always patronizing….

Instead, as Kemp complained, Republicans tend to focus on marketing – PR, advertising, gimmicky slogans – to sell the same old policies that have failed time and again in the political marketplace. They strenuously resist reexamining their policies because they either believe such policies are perfect or fear admitting error in supporting those that have failed.

Thus we hear a lot from Republicans about finding ways of attracting the fast-growing Latino population or long-lost black voters, a third of whom voted Republican before 1964 Republican nominee Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after which it fell to 10 percent. But such efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on tokenism – nominating a Latino such as Sen. Rubio, who is of Cuban descent, for president or appointing African American Rep. Tim Scott to the Senate to replace the departing Jim DeMint.

Tokenism almost never sells and is patronizing to those at whom it is directed. Only a genuine recognition that many Republicans policies, such as slashing government aid to the poor to pay for tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, are deeply unpopular in the nonwhite population will help. As long as Republicans have an us-versus-them mentality – with “them” being anyone who is not white – they don’t have a prayer of making inroads with minorities.

The first step toward renewal is for Republicans to adopt an attitude of genuine empathy and inclusion toward workers, minorities and the poor, as Kemp had. Better policies will automatically flow from it.
Find the original column here.

Kondracke: In Kemp, a Republican Role Model

This column appeared at Roll Call:

The GOP needs to build a party that can speak to the majority of Americans

By Morton M. Kondracke

If Republicans hope to save their party from long-term minority status, they should do what I’ve been doing for the past two years: study the career of Jack Kemp.

I’ve been doing it as an oral history and biography project. They should do it as a survival mechanism. Or, better, as a way to build a party that can speak to a majority of Americans.

As opposed to 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Kemp — the Buffalo Bills quarterback, New York congressman, original sponsor of supply-side economics, Housing secretary and 1996 GOP vice presidential candidate — believed that Republicans could and should go after every voter, regardless of race or income or even union membership.

Romney turns out to have been a total cynic. When he was caught in September saying privately to donors that Republicans had no chance of winning 47 percent of voters because they were “dependent on government” and thought of themselves as “victims,” he distanced himself from his own words, calling them “totally wrong.”

But then, in a post-election private talk to donors, he blamed his loss on “gifts” that President Barack Obama had given to various interest groups. He clearly meant what he said in September — that politics is just a bidding war.

Kemp was the opposite: a thoroughgoing idealist who exuded optimism and believed the GOP could win majorities by fostering hope, growth and opportunity for everyone.

He was so idealistic, in fact, that he genuinely believed that by producing sustained growth and prosperity, the GOP could once again become “the party of Lincoln,” the natural political home of African-Americans. That was unrealistic, but if anyone could have cut into Democratic dominance among blacks, it was Kemp. As a football player, one quip went, “Kemp showered with more African-Americans than most Republicans have ever met.”

A self-proclaimed “bleeding heart conservative,” Kemp sponsored enterprise zone legislation with Democrats to eliminate taxes in poverty-stricken neighborhoods, to attract investment and jobs.

He visited homeless shelters as a first order of business as Housing secretary, walked the streets of Los Angeles after the city’s 1992 riots and insisted on campaigning in ghettos and barrios during the 1996 campaign as Bob Dole’s vice presidential candidate.

In 1994, he denounced California’s Proposition 187, which would have denied government benefits to illegal aliens, and he advocated a comprehensive immigration overhaul to the end of his days. He died in 2009.

Even if there was no way for Romney to win more than 6 percent of black votes against Obama, a Kemp-like platform could have saved him from a 44-point loss among Latinos and a 47 percent loss among Asian-Americans.

As Republican pollster Whit Ayres wrote in his post-election analysis, “the handwriting is on the wall. Until Republican candidates figure out how to perform better among non-white voters, especially Hispanics and Asians, Republican presidential contenders will have an extraordinarily difficult time winning presidential elections from this point forward.”

Republicans are searching furiously for ways to get right with Hispanics after Romney’s “self-deportation” self-immolation. Kemp’s example offers a path. Some also are furiously denouncing Romney’s “gift” analysis.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s response sounds especially Kempian. “We need to get two messages out loudly and early,” he said. “One, we are fighting for 100 percent of the vote, and secondly, our policies benefit every American who wants to pursue the American dream. Period. No exceptions.”

That’s a good first step, but most Republicans have yet to find a way to sell conservative economics as an opportunity engine.

In his time, Kemp led his party away from an austerity politics focused on balanced budgets, lower spending and higher taxes toward growth politics based on permanent tax rate cuts.

He modeled his 1976 tax bill on President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 proposals and adopted Kennedy’s “a rising tide lifts all boats” slogan.

Kennedy’s measure, enacted after his assassination, lowered top tax rates from 91 percent to 70 percent. The Kemp-Roth bill, adopted and pushed through by President Ronald Reagan, lowered the rate from 70 percent to 50 percent. And, in 1986, a Reagan tax reform bill backed by Kemp lowered the rate to 28 percent and eliminated dozens of breaks and deductions.

America’s growth problems are different today than they were in Kemp’s era. “Stagflation” — simultaneous high inflation and unemployment — were the problem then. Now it’s high unemployment and staggering debt.

Today, Kemp surely would favor drastic tax changes to cut rates and eliminate the loopholes drilled into the tax code since 1986.

He was never much in favor of cutting entitlements, but I’d guess that, like his former intern, Rep. Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., he’d favor reining them in to preserve social safety nets without encouraging dependency.

Kemp was never a believer in deep domestic spending cuts, either. Some of that needs to happen, but growth also requires spending on education, infrastructure and research.

The GOP today has a demographic problem, a messaging problem and — most of all — an attitude problem. The Kemp model could solve them all. He really believed in creating an opportunity society for everyone.

 

mortonkondracke@cqrollcall.com