During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Kemp saw an opportunity to put cities back on the national agenda of a Republican president, which would have been a transformative event in conservative politics. The Houston Chronicle described the atmosphere with lyrical flourish:

For one fleeting moment, it was as if a window had flown wide open after being frozen shut for years. Political leaders dusted off the hoary notion of an urban agenda...Many Americans hoped that, somehow, the stubborn dilemmas of crime and poverty that so dehumanize urban life would be tackled with a renewed public will.

But even the 1992 riots could not induce action from Bush and the president vetoed urban policy legislation, which included the Enterprise Zones that Secretary Kemp had fervently advocated. Conservatives chose, instead, to blame urban ills on the welfare system. As Stuart Butler of the conservative Heritage Foundation wrote, "Today's welfare system, and the irresponsibility it demands as the price for government aid, is perhaps the leading cause of the destructive social and economic environment in America's inner cities - the environment that made the Los Angeles riots a possibility."

Yet, for all the praise showered on Kemp for bucking conservative orthodoxy and focusing the federal government's attention on cities, his proposals, far from moderate, espoused the very "benign neglect" theory of urban governance that has hindered relationships between the federal government and cities since Ronald Reagan. The Enterprise Zones Kemp was so fond of, which provided extensive tax breaks in targeted areas to attract investment, were first hatched during the Reagan Administration with the justification that "cities are not mentioned in the Constitution."

While superficially part of an urban strategy, such zones are antithetical to the idea of federal planning for the needs of urban areas: suspension of regulations - government inaction - was the mechanism by which EZs were to revitalize cities. Indeed, policymakers at the time associated Kemp with the orthodox conservative conception of urban areas. Democratic Representative Bruce Vento of Minnesota complained that Kemp had "HUD on an autopilot with Heritage Foundation software..."

It is certainly true that Kemp stood for more than a "party of no". Michael Kinsley, writing in The New Republic in 1990, distinguished Kemp from conservative do-nothings. In reference to the idea leadership of Kemp and Newt Gingrich, he wrote:

[W]hat has blocked [their] ideas for the past decade has been far less the liberal establishment than conservative opposition to any major national initiative (other than vacuous volunteerism) to address any social problem (other than drugs).

But praising Kemp's thought leadership because it represents the only Republican attempt to talk about cities (beyond the Heritage Foundation's tiresome attacks on the welfare state) is unjustified. A real federal urban policy seeks to maximize federal investment in the places where most people work and most economic activity occurs - that is, in cities - through partnerships between federal officials, state governments, and city officials.

Despite his welcome advocacy of cities and his support for a more inclusionary conservative movement, Kemp was still consumed by an ideological predilection for tax cuts and deregulation that could never meet the demands of urban policy.

Thus, when asked about President George W. Bush's urban agenda, Kemp replied:

Enterprise zones, along with school choice, personal retirement accounts and other pro-family initiatives supported by Bush, represent a complete urban agenda.

A complete urban agenda, perhaps, but one that forgot cities.