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Opinion: Does Jack Kemp scramble his ‘dear friend’ McCain’s nerves?

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While campaigning in Buffalo, N.Y., John McCain made a puzzling comment about a local hero, Jack Kemp.

First he called Kemp -- a onetime Buffalo Bills quarterback who later represented western New York for nine terms as a Republican congressman -- a ‘dear friend.’ But McCain, speaking at an art museum Monday, went on to say that ‘I haven’t met anybody who isn’t afraid of Jack Kemp.’

It’s not clear what it is about Kemp, 73, that might inspire fear. As footballers go, he wasn’t very big. One listing shows that he was all of 5 feet, 10 inches and 175 pounds back when he played for Occidental College in his native Los Angeles.

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And while he led the Bills to two championships in the old American Football League in the mid-1960s, his strong suit was his ability to scramble and pass, not to overpower.

Perhaps Kemp got a little scary, at least to some, when he helped shape the Reagan agenda and embraced supply-side economics -- a theory that George H.W. Bush, who later named Kemp his Housing secretary -- once famously called ‘voodoo economics.’ Or maybe McCain’s anxieties were raised simply by the memory of what happened when Kemp was the No. 2 person on Bob Dole’s Republican presidential ticket in 1996; they were defeated by Democrats Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

— Stuart Silverstein

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