Jack Kemp, R.I.P.

Jack Kemp faded from public view after the 1996 election, leaving us with a mental image of boundless energy and eternal youth. So Saturday's news came as a shock: Kemp died? But he was so young!

I supported Kemp's primary run in 1988, and was enthusiastic about his 1996 effort to save the Dole campaign. Kemp, like Ronald Reagan, radiated optimism, humanity, and progress: indeed, he exactly embodied my aspirations for conservatism. Kemp was a conservative version of Barak Obama: free markets had solved the economic problem; all that remained to us was to spread the blessings of enterprise to larger swathes of the globe, where inside every African, Arab, and Mexican was an American struggling to get out.

This vision had great appeal to me personally, although the 1991 recession reminded me how fragile our prosperity really was. But it was 9/11 that spelled the end for Kemp's optimistic view of the world. The world, it turned out, was much darker and dangerous than we had expected. We were not, it turned out, the nation everyone wanted to love, and our civilization was not the envy of the world.

And most significantly, we discovered that inside every African, Arab, and Mexican is not an American struggling to get out. These people have their own racial destinies to follow, destinies that are no more compatible with our way of life than we have the ability to direct them.

UPDATE: (Not the Onion.) Arlen Specter (D-Penn) blames Kemp's death on the GOP.