Science & Tech Quote by Jack Kemp

Kemp’s line reads like a compliment, but it also functions as a cultural alibi: a way for late-90s Republicans to sound fluent in a future arriving faster than their policy apparatus could comfortably parse. Saying Bush “understands the Internet” isn’t an empirical claim so much as a talisman against the era’s anxiety that Washington was analog while markets were going digital. The phrasing is tellingly corporate and boosterish, less about networks and power than about “the incredible expansion of global e-commerce” - a tidy substitution of technological complexity with a single, investor-friendly storyline: growth.

The intent is political triangulation inside the party. Kemp, a supply-side evangelist with a modernizer’s sheen, is lending Bush a credential that matters in a post-Clinton economy: competence in the language of the new prosperity. It’s reassurance for donors and suburban professionals who saw the Internet as both a gold rush and a destabilizer. He’s effectively saying: don’t worry, our guy won’t break the machine that’s minting your 401(k).

The subtext is that “understanding” equals trusting markets. There’s no mention of privacy, monopolies, labor displacement, or the widening digital divide - all already visible at the margins. By collapsing the Internet into e-commerce, Kemp frames the web as a frictionless extension of capitalism, not a contested public space. Context matters: this is the peak of dot-com optimism, when “global” sounded like destiny and deregulation felt like pragmatism. The line works because it sells modernity without having to describe it.