Jack Kemp was supposed to be to Bob Dole what Joe Lieberman was to John Kerry. But he was a lot more.

On his death at 73, he is being remembered as one of the pillars of the Republican Party revolution of the last for decades.

A former football star, Jack Kemp went into politics in 1970 when he ran for Congress. When asked why he felt he was qualified to be a Congressman, Jack said, “Pro football gave me a good sense of perspective to enter politics: I’d already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, traded and hung in effigy.”

It was Kemp and not Reagan who made tax cut the center piece of the Republican economic policy. As a representative of Buffalo in Washington, he argued in 1978 that supply-side economic theory was the way to go because America was suffering under, “tax code that rewards consumption, leisure, debt and borrowing, and punishes savings, investment, work and production.”

When Reagan came into power, taxes were reduced by 23%. The bill that did that was named after Kemp.

Thirty years after, that supply-side economic theory that was supposed to tickle down to the poor was finally repudiated by American voters. Never mind that many Republicans are still in denial.

As the quarterback of the Buffalo Bills that won two American Football league championships, Kemp transferred his admiration of the black linesmen who protected him on the football field into a call for his Republican party to reach out to minorities. “I can’t help but care about the rights of the people I used to shower with,” he often said.

He failed in that count. And as recent as 2008, he continued to argue that, “The party of Lincoln needs to rethink and revisit its historic roots as a party of emancipation, liberation, civil rights and equality of opportunity for all.”

In 1965, Kemp supported the boycott of the all-star game in New Orleans by black players because cabs and nightclubs will not let them in. The game was later moved to Houston. He was a member of the federal committee that fought for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a national holiday- a holiday that John McCain opposed.

Kemp talked the talk and walked the walk. As Housing and Urban Secretary under George H. Bush and as Bob Dole’s vice-presidential candidate, he made efforts to pay attention to the needs of minorities. He was an advocate of immigration reforms while his party continues to advocate a draconic immigration policy.

Kemp called himself a bleeding-heart conservative. It is hard to find in today’s political arena a conservative who has a heart at all, not to talk of a bleeding heart. He will be missed by all those who desire to see a credible opposition party in America.