The Importance of Jack Kemp:
blockquote>...his lost presidential run in 1988 did land him in the unlikely spot of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. It was there that Reaganites huddled in what was generally viewed as one of the least important backwaters of the federal government, a place touched by scandal at that. Ignored by the powers of the Bush 41 administration, Kemp blew into this concrete box with the force of a category five hurricane. If you worked for him you were quickly a part of an ongoing tutorial -- done under the guise of a "brown bag lunch" -- that featured everything from Heritage Foundation policy wonks to Sir Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Winston Churchill, to Alex Kotlowitz, the author of There Are No Children Here. The last was a gripping tale of two boys growing up amid the abysmal failure of liberal urban policy, in this case Chicago's Henry Horner Homes. Also up for discussion was Assets and the Poor, a book about the failures of the welfare system.
It wasn't always tutorials, either. Kemp himself was not only out there in America's inner cities inspecting the failures of urban liberalism, he made damn sure his staff got out there too. I remember one particular tour of the Ellen Wilson project in Washington -- a serious disgrace surrounded in broad daylight by drug dealers that is, I believe, now gone. The entire department rocked, at times shell shocked, to Kemp's preaching of the gospel of capitalism and tax cuts.
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