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Is Bret Schundler the next Jack Kemp?
Originally appeared in the Detroit News on 07/01/2001
Jack Kemp lives -- and his name is Bret Schundler.
Kemp, of course, is the supply-side crusader and former congressman from Buffalo who could never quite make it to the top of American politics. Schundler is the avowedly supply-side mayor of Jersey City who just humbled New Jersey's GOP establishment by crushing its hand-picked candidate 57-43 percent in the state's gubernatorial primary. If Schundler can now defeat his liberal Democratic opponent in the general election, it will be the latest and starkest demonstration of the continuing political power of the Kemp/Reagan economic message.
That's crucial, because evidence continues to gather of a sense of malaise about the American economy -- indeed, about the world economy. The National Bureau of Economic Research recently suggested that America may be slipping into recession despite the Federal Reserve's interest rate cuts. Japan is entering the 12th year of economic stagnation after decades of robust growth, though the effective interest rate there is virtually zero. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill the other day signalled his sense of desperation by urging Europe to stimulate faster growth there.
Schundler, who is 42, credits Kemp with inspiring him to enter politics after a successful career on Wall Street. And Kemp was by his side Tuesday night when Schundler declared victory over the GOP establishment's candidate, Bob Franks, and pledged to take a tax-cutting, education-reforming, regulation-reducing message to the voters against his liberal Democratic opponent.
Schundler raised eyebrows when he cashed in his considerable fortune in 1992 to run for mayor of a bombed-out city on the other side of the Hudson River. He raised eyebrows even further by running as a Republican in a mostly black and minority community. But he did so because he recognized that in places like Jersey City, government had long ago become part of the problem, not the solution.
As mayor, Schundler delivered. He has held down taxes, cut red tape, privatized the water system, encouraged educational choice -- after an earlier state takeover of the school system failed miserably -- and placed city finances on a stronger basis. His goal has been individual opportunity, a refreshing change from the victimology practice by most big-city mayors. And voters responded: he won each of his reelection campaigns by wide margins, including more than 60 percent of the Latino vote and nearly half the black vote.
The media, noting Schundler's pro-life, anti-gun control stances, seldom misses an opportunity to portray him as a hard-core conservative, implying that he is somehow outside the mainstream. But the criticism misses the point, just as the same kind of attack missed the point about Jack Kemp, the supposed arch-conservative who won election after election to Congress from heavily Democratic Buffalo, N.Y.
Both men may be conservative on social issues, at least by comparison with the press corps, but on the pocketbook issues their main concern has been how to make the American dream achievable for everybody. It's a distinctly anti-elitest viewpoint that challenges traditional conservatism just as surely as it challenges welfare-state liberalism.
"I want there to be a day when African-American children in the lowest-income sections of this state don't feel there is a wall separating them from the opportunities other children have," Schundler told his triumphant supporters Tuesday night.
Many Republicans have given lip service to the same goal. But Schundler has walked the walk. In the news from New Jersey, it's possible to glimpse the torch of supply-side conservatism -- "compassionate conservatism," in the formulation of George W. Bush -- passing to a new generation, tested in a long and bitter intellectual war, hardened by political experience and poised to resume the offensive nationally.
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