Michael Smerconish: Jack Kemp's winning game plan

5.7.09

By Michael Smerconish - Daily News

Daily News Opinion Columnist

I HAD MY last conversation with Jack Kemp in October.

No surprise, our focus was to be on tax policy. But the part of our dialogue that will always stay with me had to do with football and his family.

I asked him if he could still throw a spiral at 73. "I can throw a spiral," he assured me. "I can't throw it very far anymore.

"I used to be able to throw it - believe it or not - about 90 yards. But, you know, I've aged a little bit. I was in Vail, Colo., last summer with my grandsons, and they put the ball on the ground, ran out for a pass, and said, 'Grandpa, Grandpa, throw me a pass!' By the time I picked up the ball, they were 50 yards down the field, and I said, 'Hey, come back to around 15!' "

Kemp was the Republican quarterback who tried to re-write the party's playbook. Others will remember Kemp as a professional football player, nine-term congressman, secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Bush 41, and VP candidate for Bob Dole.

I'll remember him as a onetime boss.

In 1991, HUD was divided into 10 regions, and I was a federal housing commissioner responsible for the one that included Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington.

This was at a time when HUD, under Kemp's leadership, was trying to transfer ownership of public housing to the tenants. One of the first was to be Tyler House, a Washington development.

That's where I met Elaine Johns. Ms. Johns, then approaching 70, was a tenant leader who had invited Kemp for a tour of Tyler House in June 1989.

Kemp was so disgusted by the conditions ("The rats are so bad here you find them in the hall; you get up in the morning, and you find them dead in your apartment," Johns said at the time) that he described them as "scandalous." He vowed to make it a poster child for his homeownership initiative.

Before my meeting with Ms. Johns roughly two years later, I remember being told by a colleague that I needed to be particularly attentive to her. When I asked why, I was told that whenever Ms. Johns called Kemp, he took the call.

That was classic Kemp. He wasn't politicking for the sake of appearing populist. He was accessible because people like Elaine Johns were at the heart of the two most important causes in his political career - incentive-oriented economics and equality-oriented politics.

Kemp was a believer in giving people - especially minorities - a bigger stake in their own future. That's why he pushed his initiative to sell public-housing tenants their apartments "with the fervor of a Southern Baptist preacher," as a New York Times reporter wrote in 1996.

It's also why he became a lone GOP voice urging the party to apply the principles of fiscal conservatism to address urban problems and reach out to minority constituents. Kemp, a self-described "bleeding-heart conservative" working in an administration perceived as inattentive to urban issues, received three standing ovations during a speech at the NAACP's annual convention in 1989.

"You see, real leadership is not just seeing the realities of what we are temporarily faced with, but seeing the possibilities and potential that can be realized by lifting up people's vision of what they can be," he wrote in a letter to his 17 grandchildren published a few weeks after our October conversation.

Unfortunately, too many of those now playing the games that Kemp did - athletics and politics - are in it for the stats or the sound bite.

They'd be better off running the routes recommended by Kemp, the GOP quarterback so invested in his playbook that a consultant once told him: "If I could remove two-thirds of your knowledge and three-fourths of your vocabulary, I could make you into a decent candidate." *

Listen to Michael Smerconish weekdays 5-9 a.m. on the Big Talker, 1210/AM. Read him Sundays in the Inquirer. Contact him via the Web at www.mastalk.com.