Politics & Power Quote by Jack Kemp

Kemp’s line lands like an intra-party indictment delivered in the calm language of a policy memo. “Really has not been” is the tell: he’s not accusing Republicans of overt hostility so much as chronic neglect, a strategic silence that functions as its own message. By naming “the poor” alongside “the African American community,” Kemp braids economics and race into a single electoral failure, pushing back on the party’s habit of treating poverty as a moral problem and Black voters as a permanent write-off.

The intent is partly reformist, partly tactical. Kemp, a supply-side Republican with an evangelist’s zeal for enterprise zones and homeownership, believed conservatism could be sold as uplift rather than austerity. This quote is him arguing that Republican ideas aren’t merely unpopular in these constituencies; they’ve been poorly translated, poorly delivered, and too often undermined by cultural signaling that reads as indifference at best, contempt at worst.

The subtext is also a critique of the post-civil-rights GOP bargain: win white working- and middle-class voters through coded appeals, then act surprised when Black voters hear the code. Kemp is pointing to a messaging vacuum created by policy choices (cuts to safety nets, “law and order” postures) and by the party’s narrowed definition of who “the base” is. In the late 20th-century context, as Democrats consolidated Black support and Republicans hardened around suburban and Southern coalitions, Kemp’s remark is both warning and elegy: a party that won’t speak to these communities shouldn’t expect to be heard by them.