Former Delaware Gov. Pete du Pont, who died Saturday at age 86, ran the single most ideas-heavy presidential campaign in my lifetime.
Some conservatives just wish he had picked another year in which to do it.
In a 1988 Republican field featuring epochal political figures such as George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, Jack Kemp, and Pat Robertson, columnist George Will wrote that du Pont offered by far “the highest substance to blather ratio.” Du Pont also earned plaudits from such diverse sources as Southern conservative columnist James Kilpatrick and the moderately liberal black columnist William Raspberry. Kilpatrick wrote that du Pont’s ideas were so bold that, in terms of political salability, they showed “the kind of recklessness identified with riders who break records or break legs, one or the other.”
In addition to joining Kemp as the only two true economic supply-siders in the field that year, du Pont pushed five unique proposals he said were not just right (in both the senses of being correct and being conservative), but “damn right.” It’s hard to remember, now that some of them have become standard-issue conservative positions, just how bold and “cutting edge” several of those ideas were back then.
Most controversially, du Pont called for including private investments within the Social Security system — a plan that, if adopted in 1989, would have allowed retirees to accumulate stock market savings that increased in value (based on the Dow Jones Industrial Average) nearly 6 times faster than inflation over the past 32 years. He was indeed damn right about that.
Du Pont also was right to advocate a school voucher system, a version of which, in the form of education scholarships, has proved wildly popular in 18 states. He was right to push for replacement of welfare with a “workfare” system and major expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit — both of which were later adopted by Congress with great success. Du Pont was less successful in urging that students pass a drug test to earn driver’s licenses (although random drug testing did become a staple of many workplaces) and in urging a gradual transition away from farm subsidies.
And, with a passion matched only by Kemp, du Pont also supported the anti-missile Strategic Defense Initiative and the anti-communist forces in Central America.
In pushing these ideas to prominence in a major presidential campaign, du Pont did a great service to conservatism and country. Still, some conservatives wish he hadn’t run. After a wildly successful two terms as governor from 1977 to 1985, du Pont had been urged to run for Senate in 1984 against Joe Biden. Or, he could have eyed a key Cabinet post in the first post-Reagan administration, setting himself up for a presidential run in 1996, when he still would have been 61 years young.
Instead, du Pont’s presidential campaign split the efforts of supply-siders between himself and Kemp. This was in a year in which supply-siders needed to consolidate to match the institutional firepower enjoyed by Bush and Dole. Kemp, of course, was seen as the national progenitor of conservative “growth economics,” but du Pont had been the first person to show supply-side policies worked in practice. As governor, he had used tax cuts and deregulation to attract enough new business that he eliminated a huge state debt and brought boom times to Delaware.
Anyway, the patrician du Pont, an excellent podium speaker but hardly a warmly approachable grassroots campaigner, failed to catch electoral fire but ran strongly enough in the key New Hampshire primary to keep Kemp from turning the big two into a big three. (In the end, Kemp’s undisciplined and consultant-heavy campaign may still have failed to stop Bush, but some conservatives still lament that he never got enough footing to find out.)
In terms of votes earned for president, Pete du Pont will be barely a blip in the history books. But he was, wrote John Fund in National Review Online, “a good man who would have made a great president.” More than that, by providing in Delaware a successful test case for what became known as “Reaganomics” and by insisting that creative intellectual ferment remain a key facet of modern conservatism, du Pont served his country well.
“I have to put ideas out that can move the country,” he insisted. At that, Pete du Pont surely succeeded.
