Jack Kemp Dies at 73

AP reports:

Jack Kemp, the ex-quarterback, congressman, one-time vice-presidential nominee and self-described “bleeding-heart conservative,” died Saturday. He was 73.

Kemp died after a lengthy illness, according to spokeswoman Bona Park and Edwin J. Feulner, a longtime friend and former campaign adviser. Park said Kemp died at his home in Bethesda, Md., in the Washington suburbs.

Kemp’s office announced in January that he had been diagnosed with an unspecified type of cancer. By then, however, the cancer was in an advanced stage and had spread to several organs, Feulner said. He did not know the origin of the cancer…

Through his political life, Kemp’s positions spanned the social spectrum: He opposed abortion and supported school prayer, yet appealed to liberals with his outreach toward minorities and compassion for the poor. He pushed for immigration reform to include a guest-worker program and status for the illegal immigrants already here.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs, he proposed more than 50 programs to combat urban blight and homelessness and was an early and strong advocate of enterprise zones.

In 1993, along with former Education Secretary William Bennett and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick, he co-founded Empower America, a public policy organization intended to promote economic growth, job creation and entrepreneurship.

His choice as Dole’s 1996 running mate was seen as a way for the Republican Party to reach groups of voters that Dole could not. And it came even after Kemp endorsed Steve Forbes for the nomination — a move many considered political suicide — and declared himself a “recovering politician.”

3 Comments

  1. 1
    Oliver Kopec says:

    Jack Kemp Dies at 73 – Liberal Values – Defending Liberty and …: Kemp died after a lengthy illness, according .. http://bit.ly/3FFl2q

  2. 2
    Oliver Kopec says:

    Jack Kemp Dies at 73 – Liberal Values – Defending Liberty and …: Kemp died after a lengthy illness, according .. http://bit.ly/3FFl2q

  3. 3
    Eclectic Radical says:

    I actually liked Jack Kemp, though politically there is a really wide gulf there. I found his conservative positions to be based on the kind of careful, nuanced, reflective self-appraisal (at least for much of his career) that Republicans tend to bash in Democrats. He was a decent HUD secretary, far better than any other conservative I can think of would ever be. He always sounded like someone with whom I could respectfully disagree without losing my respect for him, and those kinds of conservatives are rarer and rarer.

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