A Few Good Republican Men

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

I tend to like (individual) Republicans, I think just to annoy my mama. “Mom!” I’ll say, “I sure do like that Orrin Hatch! Did you know he and Ted Kennedy co-sponsored a bill to insure all the little poor children in the country? What a swell guy sort of! I like him! I do!” For a while I can hear her try to keep her blood pressure down. “Is that right?” she asks. “Huh, how interesting!” And then, the attempt exhausted, her head explodes all over the phone. Someone’s going to have some spot cleaning to do!

I liked Ed Rollins once. Mama didn’t like that. I liked Arnold Schwarzenegger, but only because I’d just seen him in person, and power is a stupid, sexy thing. (Also, he was wearing a really great tie.) She understood that completely. I even was engaged once or twice to a GOP operative. She was as nice about that as she could possibly be.

And so I’ve always had a soft spot for now-dead Jack Kemp. You all already know this week he was the father of Supply Side Economics (Laffer who?), which is certainly a drag, and you all already know this week he was the last Republican non-racist—in fact, he was less racist than you. (Everyone’s a little bit racist!) But while it’s easy (and pat) to explain his inclusivity by his time in the Buffalo Bills locker room (showering with more black men than compassionate conservative George W. Bush had met), how do you explain the Mexicans?

Jack Kemp didn’t just sound good on race. He came out forcefully against the very merry Prop. 187, as did, astonishingly, the “Bookie of Virtues” Bill Bennett—and even more than that, he took direct and flabbergasting action. As Secretary for Housing and Urban Development, he directed that applicants for public housing couldn’t be discriminated against on the basis of immigration status, and he threatened the City of Costa Mesa, that shimmering Shangri-La of racial transcendence, with the loss of all their federal funds if they kicked their Mescuns out of their Section 8. It’s only since 1995—yes, under Bill Clinton, and aren’t we all just fainting with surprise?—that folks have had to prove their residency to qualify for a home.

I don’t know what I wrote that prompted the following long-ago letter from John Harris of Huntington Beach; it was 1998, and OC Weekly was only barely online.

I think I'm losing the ability to see Rebecca Schoenkopf's sarcasm. Jack Kemp “truly is a Republican who cares about the poor” (Commie Girl, Oct. 2)? Rebecca, what are you up to? Forget about what the guy says; look at his actions. He's a rank capitalist, and capitalism, as you know, insists on rabid inequality and poverty for its very existence.

Sure, he's caring. If you're hungry, he'll give you a napkin. If you're homeless, he'll give you a cardboard box (just don't sleep in it near his property or anywhere anyone can see you; it might impact property values, don'tcha know).

“Trickle down” doesn't work on nachos, and it doesn't work on the street. And as long as that Clinton/Kemp “business-rules” elite has us believing their fairytales—and as long as our supposed “unions” act more like country clubs than vanguards of opposition—then poverty and the poor will always be. The only way we can resolve the contradictions and cruelties of present-day life is if democratic socialism eradicates poverty by forging workers' control of the means of production and exchange.

Okay, Rebecca, put the glass down. Halftime is over. Let's get back to the struggle!

John Harris was right about trickle-down (and democratic socialism, and my putting the glass down), but he was wrong about Kemp.

Credit where it’s due, Jack Kemp was a gentleman—“Huh,” my mother will say, “how interesting!”—and the next time we apply for public housing, which may come sooner than we thought, we will think of him, and Bill Clinton, and I know who in that moment anyway will come out ahead.

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