AMERICAN FOOTBALL

To President Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, former American football player spent in politics, died on May 2, at the age of 73 years, from cancer, had provided in the 1980 part of the rhetorical arsenal that would shape the United States until the recent economic crisis. "My favorite quote, he said, still in April 2007, was Abraham Lincoln who said:" I do not believe in a law that would prevent a man from getting rich. " 

Jack Kemp was convinced that legislation was inherently harmful to the increase of wealth, and that individual aspiration was to become the foundation of the collective enrichment. 

George Bush son, he helped develop some of the arguments that a time would popularize a concept ideological today fallen into disuse: the "compassionate conservatism." An example: "I do not believe that people of any color or low income hate the rich. They want to become rich. Unfortunately, not all of them can access it." 

In October 2008, while the United States fell heavily into recession, he explained again, at one month of the presidential election that would see Barack Obama win, that "time (was) came to consider reductions 'taxes in general. " He denounced the draft financial investment of the massive U.S. State to clean up the banking sector and stem the economic crisis as "the worst" options. 

Until his last breath, Jack Kemp remained a proponent determined tax and deregulation. A posterity, it leaves a law called Kemp-Roth (the other sponsor was the Democratic Senator William Roth). Adopted in 1981 at the beginning of the first term of Ronald Reagan, she began a decline of 23% income tax in three years and was the source of a radical change to the "less state". For Norman Ornstein of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, Jack Kemp has had an impact on the conservative economic philosophy in the United States more than anyone, more than (the economist Arthur) Laffer, more than Reagan. " 

But the Republican representative of the State of New York from 1971 until 1989, when he became home secretary in George Bush Sr. was also an emblematic figure of a central social category of the Republican Party: the white worker, but a patriot anti-racist, "anti" of everything but be open to racial minorities and immigrants. Jack Kemp tried throughout his political career to broaden Republican influence in the black minority of large industrial centers. Barack Obama once elected, he had published an open letter in which he called his party to "return to its historical roots, that of emancipation, liberation, civil rights and opportunities for everyone." 

Ronald Reagan entered politics through the Hollywood unions. Jack Kemp, he had set up a union of professional football that he did not hesitate to lead in the strike. The sport he had practiced for thirteen years, with more talent than the former president had not been to the cinema: it was the quarterback of the team of the Buffalo Bills, who is the more strategic the game and winning twice in 1964 and 1965, the final of the American Football League. Voted best player in the country, he liked to recall that without the "black guard" that protected him from his opponents on the ground, it would never become the star he was. 

Many vote on him to seek the Republican nomination for the presidential election of 1996. He eventually give up and was designated by the colistier Party candidate, Bob Dole, with whom, public knowledge, he had very little affinity. Their failure, in front of the ticket Democrat Bill Clinton-Al Gore, signed the end of his political career.