The president has spoken, and it's now clear that one of the things Hurricane Katrina washed up from the deep was Jack Kempism.
Jack Kempism is the way the Republican Party has dealt with issues of race and poverty since the start of Ronald Reagan's presidency. By definition, the Republican Party since the start of the Reagan presidency doesn't want to deal with issues of race and poverty, so most of the time Jack Kempism is an ideology on the shelf. Its only fair-weather proponent has been Jack Kemp himself, who has long maintained a genuine concern for the African American poor. It has taken an outbreak of truly foul weather -- a hurricane, a failed response from a Republican-controlled government, a backlash against George W. Bush for his monumental insensitivity and incompetence -- for the Republicans to embrace Jack Kempism. But that's exactly what Bush did last night.
Kemp, a onetime NFL quarterback, was elected to Congress in the early '70s and quickly became one of the conservative movement's leading lights, pushing for tax cuts (even before Reagan), which soon became the party orthodoxy, and empowerment zones for the inner city, which soon became the party rhetoric. In 1989, George Bush Senior appointed Kemp the secretary of the Housing and Urban Development Department, and Bob Dole chose him as his running mate in 1996, chiefly to placate the Gingrich generation of Republicans who viewed Dole as a holdover from the Nixon era and thus suspiciously soft on government.
Problem was, empowerment zones never amounted to much. The zones were established in poverty-stricken, heavily minority areas of cities, and their premise was that by cutting taxes on businesses willing to locate there, lightening the regulations, maybe suspending the minimum wage, the government could kick-start a culture of entrepreneurial small businesses that would end the cycles of poverty. On the whole, however, the normal funders of such enterprises -- banks and other lending institutions -- had scant interest in getting such businesses up and running even under perfect Milton Friedmanite conditions. Inner-city entrepreneurial cultures did arise, of course, but more frequently among immigrant groups, such as Koreans, with a strong entrepreneurial culture and lending institutions of their own.
But Jack Kempism was serviceable to Republicans whether or not it worked, for it was their answer to the allegation that they were indifferent to minority poverty and had no program or vision to combat it. As a party rooted in the suburbs and increasingly within the white working class, Republicans weren't often placed on the defensive on these matters, and if they were, they really didn't much care. But Kemp himself cared, and he believed, as most of his fellow conservatives did not, that the poverty of inner-city blacks was in part the result of a legacy of racism. But Kemp's was a niche concern in the modern Republican Party -- until Katrina.
Last night, Jack Kemp's concerns were precisely the concerns that George W. Bush had to address. The Gulf region, Bush said, was both a region of beauty and “deep, persistent poverty … as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.”
Continuing along in the Kemp playbook, Bush then proposed the creation of a “Gulf opportunity zone” -- an empowerment zone stretched across three states -- with all the telltale Kempian features of tax relief and loans to small businesses. Bush didn't say a word about wages, but he has already by executive order suspended the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, which requires the payment of prevailing wages to construction workers on any project receiving federal funds. The Washington Post reports that Bush is also contemplating suspending the Service Contract Act, which covers service workers in analogous situations, though unlike the Davis-Bacon Act, the Service Contract Act contains no provision allowing for the executive to suspend its provisions.
Note the date of the Davis-Bacon Act: 1931, the bottom of the Depression. It was intended to boost wages and spending power in a nation where both were quickly drying up. The suspension of the act now, in what was the most low-wage, poverty-stricken region of the country even before Katrina struck, would perfect Bush's opportunity zone, creating an almost otherworldly paradise of Kempian, pre-New Deal laissez faire.
Except that Bush has been compelled to embrace governmental solutions as well. The magnitude of the disaster has also forced him to propose some more classically Great Society remedies, including making $5,000 available to evacuees for job training and education. Of course, when the Great Society emerged in the '60s, there were still decent-paying jobs in America that didn't require high levels of credentialing and specialized skills. The jobs for which the new beneficiaries of these worker recovery accounts will be trained may have long since been exported, or become a good deal less remunerative since the economy has gone global.
So we have a little Great Society here, a little Jack Kempism there. And it's not entirely Katrina that has turned Bush to Jack Kempism. The demographic transformation of the nation and the electorate has now made it impossible for the Republicans to ignore minority voters, as Ken Mehlman's speaking schedule makes abundantly clear. Karl Rove has read the census data and charted an increasingly Kempian course some years ago. But Katrina has sped up the process.
Still, the basic outlines of Bush's response remain unchanged. A national catastrophe has occurred, but the president last night encouraged us only to help our church groups and the Red Cross (and in a moment of almost satanic cynicism, urged local labor unions to help their counterparts in the Gulf Coast -- the very unions whose contracts and wages he had just torpedoed). No mention of rolling back the trillions of dollars in tax cuts he showered on the rich passed his lips. Polling has shown that Americans are actually willing to pay higher taxes to help rebuild the Gulf rather than incur hundreds of billions more in debt. (The same polling has also shown that support for the war in Iraq has dropped as people have realized our financial obligations here at home.) But low taxes on the rich is the holy of holies of modern Republicanism and Bushthink. Congressional right-wingers talk of making offsetting cuts, but it will be hard to argue for cutting Medicaid nationally even while the government has stepped up its payments for the medical needs of the indigent New Orleans evacuees. Comfort the drenched poor and afflict the dry? Now there's a slogan.
Like his war in Iraq, George W. Bush's war on poverty -- his low-wage war on poverty -- is doomed from its very conception. He'll probably get the Big Easy rebuilt all right, but it still won't be a city upon a hill.
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
