From this morning on Fox News Sunday:
KRISTOL: You know, just thinking about -- Juan called him a football player, which reminds me of a story. Joanne Kemp, his wife, a wonderful woman, took one of the daughters, I think, to the Senate gallery, and Jack was giving a speech on economic policy.
Someone sitting behind them, not knowing who they were, said, "What does that guy know about economics? He's a football -- he's a football player." And apparently -- I don't know if it was Judith or Jennifer -- turned to the guy behind them and said, "My daddy wasn't a football player. He was a quarterback."
WILLIAMS: Absolutely.KRISTOL: And he was -- he was a quarterback for us conservatives.
WALLACE: How important do you think he was in Reaganomics? I mean, how key a figure in everything that we associate with Reagan's economic policy?
KRISTOL: Absolutely crucial. He got there first on supply-side economics, on his sense of focused pro-growth economics. He persuaded Ronald Reagan to adopt that. Reagan had not talked about that in the '76 campaign.
By 1980, Reagan ran as apostle of pro-growth economics, not simply balancing the budget and austerity. It was absolutely decisive to the victory in '80 and to the Republican Party for the next 25 years.
WALLACE: And the final thing I want you to say, Bill -- and we have less than a minute left -- you were saying to me earlier in my office that as a young Republican, sort of like Laura was saying, in the Reagan administration, that he was much more accessible and somebody that you could -- you felt you could have some contact with as opposed to Ronald Reagan, who was on this huge pedestal.
KRISTOL: Right. I mean, for me in the '70s -- I'm older than Laura - - I mean, Kemp was sort of the -- was the leader in Washington of conservatives and combined -- and Laura was right about this -- an aggressive conservatism with a kind of happy Democratic populism that made it possible to think that conservatives could be a governing majority.
