GOP Needs Someone Like Kemp To Challenge It Into Vitality

The death of Jack Kemp has generated a flood of commentary about his unique blend of energy and passion, economic conservatism and outreach to minorities. His funeral service at Washington National Cathedral on Friday was a fitting memorial to his personal faith and irrepressible spirit. Few politicians who failed to reach the White House have left such an imprint.

But there is more than a personal story in Kemp's political life. One lesson younger Republicans should take from Kemp's example -- beyond his optimistic vision -- is the importance of challenging the existing leadership in order to maintain the vitality of a political party. Kemp and others of his generation were a constant source of pressure and often irritation to their party elders. Republicans could use some of that same spirit today as they seek to rebuild.

Kemp was a devoted Reaganite, and because he seeded the idea of supply-side tax cuts that Ronald Reagan adopted and turned into law, he is forever bound up with Reaganism in the history of the Republican Party. But Kemp represented a different generation and a different strand of Republicanism, and his failure to reach the White House may have stunted the party in ways that aren't fully understood but have application to today's problems within the Republican coalition.

One person who believes that is Vin Weber, the former Minnesota congressman who was a friend, comrade and fan of Kemp's and part of the group of conservative young Turks, led by former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who helped turn the party upside down in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Weber still remembers when, during his first days in Washington as a young congressional staffer, he saw Kemp come off an elevator. "That's our leader after Reagan," another young aide told him. This was when Kemp was still better known nationally as a former star quarterback than as a political leader.

Even then, Kemp represented the continuing evolution of conservatism that had begun with Barry Goldwater's critique of big-government liberalism, achieved majority status under Reagan and his policies that helped end the Cold War, and shifted Republican economic policies to a more positive message of growth and prosperity.

"The next phase that Kemp represented was to take those principles and apply them to a whole range of problems: education reform, health care, the inner cities, which Jack was most aggressive in emphasizing," Weber says. "That's where it was supposed to go. That's why I said to some people, the failure of Kemp to win [the White House] was a bigger setback to the Republican Party than people realized. There wasn't a similar commitment to finding ways of applying conservative principles to domestic policy."

Kemp's failure to win the White House was as much because of his own limitations as a presidential candidate as it was a rejection of his ideas by his fellow Republicans. Some talented politicians are not built to become president. But Weber's broader conclusion -- that Republicans failed to develop politically appealing policies on a range of challenges at home -- should become an organizing principle for those aspiring to lead the party back from the wilderness.

Democrats are making much this weekend of the fact that, on the Sunday talk shows, Republicans are being represented by a trio of elder statesmen: former vice president Richard B. Cheney, Arizona senator and 2008 presidential nominee John McCain and Gingrich.

All are vigorous and outspoken, and Gingrich may harbor hopes of seeking the presidency in 2012. But they speak as members of a generation who came to influence under Reagan, not the generation that must chart the party's future in a post-Reagan America that is dramatically different in makeup and seemingly changing in political identity from the one Reagan presided over.

It's likely that the next great Republican leaders are little known to the public right now. Certainly, there are potentially attractive younger Republicans in the House and Senate, among the nation's governors and, conceivably, among the unelected but aspiring cadre of candidates looking at races in 2010 and 2012. But with so much energy focused on critiquing the policies of President Obama, too little is going into challenging the party's narrowed vision or in openly prodding the existing leadership.

"I don't think you can look to the established leaders of the party and say they are going to deliver on a vision," Weber said yesterday. "Republicans who believe in a reform version of Republicanism need to be prepared to try to change their party. They have to be prepared to challenge leadership."

Weber harbors no ill will toward the current chieftains of the party, nor does he believe they should silence themselves. Many are his friends and some his longtime allies. But as he put it, party leaders rarely see their job rooted in change, and transform. Instead, they emphasize unity and consolidation. Change comes from the outside and from people willing to challenge the established order. Kemp did that with enthusiasm.

The biggest wave-makers right now are those Republicans urging the party to moderate its positions on social issues. That may be a necessary part of rebuilding the party, although there are limits as to how far the GOP as an institution can go on that without irrevocably fracturing its coalition. That alone will not bring the party back.

More acceptance of geographic diversity of views is certainly necessary, given the shrinkage of the party's standing in the Northeast and other regions. The Democrats learned this lesson in recent years and have added to their strength in Congress as a result.

And as Kemp taught, opening the party to African Americans and Latinos, though a slow process, remains fundamentally important for a political party in a country in which the white population is a smaller and smaller share of the electorate.

But developing a broadly positive domestic and foreign policy agenda are the real keys, and that will take more than words. It will require actions and sometimes acts of courage by the younger generation. Outright warfare is unlikely and could be destructive. But tension between the leaders and those prodding the party to develop a more attractive vision is a necessary prerequisite if Republicans hope for a relatively speedy return to power.