R.I.P. Jack Kemp

Cesar Conda's remembrance of Jack Kemp.

Kemp's last Townhall column honored the President he so admired: Abraham Lincoln. Some very interesting quotes from that column:

It is as true now as it was then that so much depends on having the right leadership with the right motives and at the right time in history.

For Abraham Lincoln, true welfare meant not dependency, but well-being; not equality of reward, but equality of opportunity; not reliance on the state, but reliance on oneself and one's family. He wrote, prophetically, "The progress by which the poor, honest, industrious and resolute man raises himself, that he may work on this own account and hire somebody else ... is the great principle for which this government was really formed."

[Lincoln wrote] "I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. ... I want every man to have the chance -- and I believe a black man is entitled to it -- in which he can better his condition -- when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system."

As the world's leading example of democratic capitalism, we must make it work better at home so that all our people are empowered and fully enjoy true equality of opportunity.

(italics mine)

In the 200th year since Lincoln's birth the voters of this country has at last elected a black man as our president: ironically, however, not one who embraces the noble ideals of Lincoln, but the oppressive goals of socialism; an apologist and appeaser; one who believes not in the "true equaliity of opportunity" but in the fantasy of some universal "equality" which will never exist unless it is forced on the populace by the government.

Yet, I believe as Jack Kemp said in his last column:

Because of democracy's long march from Independence Hall through Gettysburg to the streets of foreign lands, the world increasingly knows this simple yet profound truth: The yearning for freedom cannot be extinguished, the struggle for inalienable rights will never end, and nothing can deny the transcendence of liberal democratic values.

America is not over.