[Deathwatch] Jack Kemp, former Republican VP candidate, 73

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Former Republican VP candidate, congressman Kemp dies
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/02/kemp.obit/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN)  -- Former congressman and Republican vice
presidential candidate Jack Kemp died Saturday at age 73 after a battle
with cancer, his family announced.

 A onetime professional football player, Kemp served nine terms in
Congress as a representative from New York and was former Sen. Bob
Dole's running mate in 1996. He was a leading advocate of "supply-side"
tax cuts, advancing the argument that cutting taxes would boost
economic growth and yield more revenue for the federal government.

"The only way to oppose a bad idea is to replace it with a good idea,
and I like to think that I have spent my life trying to promote good
ideas," he told CNN in a 1996 interview.

Kemp "passed peacefully into the presence of the Lord" Sunday evening,
a family statement said. He disclosed his illness in January.

"During the treatment of his cancer, Jack expressed his gratitude for
the thoughts and prayers of so many friends, a gratitude which the Kemp
family shares," the family said.

Kemp quarterbacked the Buffalo Bills to back-to-back American Football
League championships in 1964 and 1965, before the merger that created
the modern NFL. When he retired in 1970 after 13 seasons, the
California native ran for Congress and represented the Buffalo area for
18 years in the House of Representatives.

 "He championed free-market principles that improved the lives of
millions of Americans and helped unleash an entrepreneurial spirit that
all of us still benefit from today," Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell, R-Kentucky, said in a statement issued late Saturday.

The 1981 tax cuts signed into law by Ronald Reagan, which cut marginal
tax rates from 70 percent to 50 percent, bore Kemp's name as a
co-sponsor. Critics mocked the policy as "trickle-down" economics and
pointed to the decade's growing budget deficits as evidence that
supply-side theories didn't work, but it has been GOP orthodoxy ever
since.
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Kemp mounted an unsuccessful presidential bid in 1988, losing the
Republican primaries to George H.W. Bush. But once in office, Bush made
Kemp his secretary of housing and urban development -- a post Kemp used
to promote what he called an "empowerment" agenda of tax breaks for
urban businesses and expanded home ownership.

Unlike many of the other conservatives of his era, Kemp actively
courted African-American support. In 1992, he told CNN's "Larry King
Live" that the GOP "could be a Lincoln party in terms of attracting
black and brown and men and women of color and low-income status and
immigrant status who want a shot at the American dream for their
children."

Many thanks to TheLenGuy for posting this obituary