The Last Gun (32 page)

As for Speaker Foley, opinion in his home state of Washington noted the NRA's turn against him but cited a laundry list of miscues and reasons for voter anger that eclipsed the gun issue. “The NRA was not the only friend turned foe,” wrote one local newspaper columnist. “Foley's humiliating defeat came from
a combination of factors,” including, among others, “the hubris of an insulated, overconfident incumbent presiding over a hated, ‘Imperial Congress,'” and “a cavalier campaign effort in a year of a heavily organized anti-government and Christian Coalition turnout.”
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Foley's pollster, Celinda Lake, summed up the election. “I think the voters are really mad,” said Lake. “And because we're in charge, they're really mad at us. They said they wanted a change [in 1992], and they don't think they got it.”
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If the Republicans thought that the 1994 election was won by the NRA, they showed little evidence of it. They planned instead “to reopen this year's angry debate over federal funding for crime-prevention measures in hopes of getting rid of midnight basketball and other programs aimed at crime prevention.”
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Not only was repeal of the ban not in the legislation proposed in the Contract with America, but even after their convincing win, the GOP leadership squashed proposals to repeal the law. The NRA soon was reported to be angry because “the Republican strategy is to steer clear of the assault-weapons ban in the first part of the session and pass measures showcasing the GOP's resolve to change the way Congress does business.”
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By July 1995—following the bombing by Timothy McVeigh of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City—the subject of repealing the ban was completely off the Senate calendar.
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In October the conservative
Weekly Standard
reported that “some conservatives are getting tired of the National Rifle Association.”
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But in January 1995, President Clinton sat down with reporters and editors of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
. During a long interview, Clinton planted the seed of a narrative that has grown into conventional political wisdom purporting to explain the humiliating 1994 defeat. The deletion of a single sentence in subsequent media reporting completely distorted what Clinton said, not to mention savaging the truth.

According to the
Plain Dealer
transcript, this is what Clinton said, the crucial sentence italicized for emphasis by this writer:

The fights that I fought, bloody though they were, cost a lot. The fight for the assault-weapons ban cost 20 members their seat in Congress. The NRA is the reason the Republicans control the House. I can't believe nobody has written that story, but it is—partly because our guys didn't know how to fight them—the NRA.
If they had all done what Bob Kerrey did, almost all of them would have survived
.
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But this is how the
Plain Dealer
reported the conversation in its news report the next day (the transcript ran inside the paper):

President Clinton yesterday said the historic Republican takeover of the House was made possible because the National Rifle Association targeted Democrats who supported his crime bill.

  
“The fights I fought. . . cost a lot—the fight for the assault-weapons ban cost 20 members their seats in Congress,” the president said in an interview with
Plain Dealer
reporters and editors. “The NRA is the reason the Republicans control the House.”
¹⁰⁷

Cutting out the last sentence of the President's quote clearly transformed the NRA from an entity that could have been beaten “if they had all done what Bob Kerrey did” into an invincible juggernaut, the single reason “the Republicans control the House.” Tanya Metaksa, the NRA's chief lobbyist, was delighted to accept the credit. “For once the president and I agree,” she was quoted by the
Plain Dealer
in its story with Clinton's truncated quote.
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Reporters and editors across the nation commenced “paring down, summarizing, or rewriting.”
¹⁰⁹
The president's salient reference to Kerrey's tough stance immediately disappeared down the media memory hole. Eventually the myth won the imprimatur of the
New York Times
in an article following the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
Reciting almost verbatim the
Plain Dealer
version, the paper reported as fact, “after he forced a ban on assault weapons through Congress, the Democrats lost control of the House and Mr. Clinton ascribed the loss to the gun lobby's campaign against those Democrats who had supported the ban.”
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But the
Plain Dealer
itself had questioned Clinton's blame-the-NRA version of the loss almost as soon as it was uttered. The paper cited political analysts who scoffed at the idea. “Just because the president says it doesn't make it so” the paper reported. “And plenty of political observers around the country say Clinton's explanation is at best a gross overstatement. At worst, it is a convenient self-delusion.” One of those who disagreed with Clinton was Stuart Rothenberg, an independent political analyst.
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“Anyone with a ‘D' behind their name had a big problem in November, whether the issue was guns, abortion or NAFTA,” he said. “All the elements of the Republican coalition worked together to crank out the Republican vote, while the Democratic interest groups, whether pro-choice, pro-gun control or women's groups, did a poor job cranking out the Democratic vote.”
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Roger Stone—a self-described “GOP hitman”
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—agreed. “The last election was not about gun control, but a repudiation of Bill and Hillary and their policies,” Stone told the newspaper. “To scapegoat the NRA is self-delusional. But I guess you can't expect him to say, ‘Well, they are repudiating me and my wife.' ”
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So, what was it that Bob Kerrey did in 1994 that others did not? The Nebraska senator was one of those specially targeted by Charlton Heston's NRA television broadside. But rather than running away from the NRA, Kerrey ran straight at it:

Kerrey grabbed his shotgun and headed out to a target range to film an aggressive response ad. After plucking a clay pigeon from the sky with a shotgun blast, Kerrey turns to the camera and says that he supports the right to bear arms and that hunters are entitled to a good weapon. But
then Kerrey hands off his shotgun, picks up an AK-47 and recalls his service as a Navy Seal commando during the Vietnam War, when he lost his right leg below the knee.

  
“Twenty-five years ago, in the war in Vietnam, people hunted me,” Kerrey says. “They needed a good weapon, like this AK-47. But you don't need one of these to hunt birds.”
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More recent in-depth analysis has confirmed the contemporary understanding that the election was about something much broader than guns.

The best way to understand 1994 is in terms of partisanship, not in terms of the specifics of the gun issue, or any other one issue. To the extent a vote in favor of the crime bill made a difference to a Democratic incumbent's election prospects, it was as one of a group of indicators—on issues like health care, gays in the military, and taxes—of whether the candidate was with or against his party in a year when that party did poorly in Republican areas. All these factors combined to create a wave election in which issues could not be separated from party. And if there was any single issue that did the most damage to Democrats that year, it was more likely the failed attempt at health care reform, according to post-election polling by Stanley Greenberg, Clinton's pollster at the time.
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Bill Clinton certainly did not believe that the NRA was omnipotent or that the assault weapons ban was a “third rail” during his successful 1996 reelection campaign. In July 1995, his campaign rolled out television ads touting his passage of the crime bill, including specifically the assault weapons ban and a measure to fund expanding local police forces. “The President is determined not to let the N.R.A. and their supporters on the Hill roll back
the assault weapons ban, or his commitment to 100,000 cops,” a White House official told the
New York Times
. Deputy White House press secretary Ginny Terzano said the assault-weapons ban was one of the president's “major achievements” and “he wanted his important message taken directly to the American people, that we must not roll back the progress.”
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The advertisements were the work of prominent members of Clinton's golden triangle—consultants Bob Squier and Dick Morris.
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Among other things, Morris became noted during Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign for his “poll-driven, pragmatista notion of ‘triangulation,' a nautically inspired gambit, meaning that to get from point A to point B, Clinton may have to tack first to point C. Ideological consistency can be cast overboard.”
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Others thought that the triangulation strategy did not go far enough. One of them was Al From, the president of the “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), who urged Clinton to break with liberals and their “old orthodoxies and old arrangements.”
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The DLC wanted—through such policies as embracing the death penalty and welfare reform—to “‘inoculate' Democrats against charges that they ignored middle-class values.” At about the time of Clinton's reelection campaign, From and others began developing a strategy they called the third way, supposedly divining new policy positions. “Triangulation is fine, but not enough,” From told the
New Republic
in 1996. “It goes halfway. . . . I believe we can develop an ideology for the dominant party.”
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From's “third way” would eventually uncoil in the form of the Third Way think tank in Washington. Along the way, the idea would throw gun control under the bus in the wake of Al Gore's 2000 defeat. Democratic political mechanics fixated on the excuse that gun control was the party's problem. “A lot of people—[former DNC Chairman Terry] McAuliffe, Daschle, [former House Minority Leader Dick] Gephardt—were going around saying that guns had been the key. . . . There was a lot of talk about how
Democrats should avoid the issue entirely,” Matt Bennett, vice president for public affairs at Third Way, explained in 2007.
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But blaming defeat on guns was as uninformed and self-serving in 2000 as it was in 1994. “For the NRA to argue that this single issue swung these states into the Bush column is revisionist history at its worst,” pollster Celinda Lake wrote in 2003.
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A more recent analysis explained the popular error in detail:

When one looks for actual evidence that the gun issue cost Gore more votes than it gained him, one comes up empty. Few scholars have performed a quantitative analysis of the role of guns in the vote of 2000, though one study examining a range of policy issues determined that the gun issue gave Gore a small advantage on election day. The argument from those who believe that the gun issue was decisive and worked against Gore usually amounts to little more than the fact that Gore lost some states where there are many pro-gun voters. This argument presumes that there were no areas in which Gore's position on guns
helped
him win a state he might otherwise have lost. But Gore won swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Iowa largely on his strength among urban and suburban voters, who are more likely to support restrictions on guns.

  
If there is one state the proponents of the theory that guns delivered the White House to George Bush inevitably point to, it is Gore's home state of Tennessee. After all, if Gore lost his home state, it must have had something to do with his position on guns. . . . Yet there are other more compelling explanations for the outcome in Tennessee, the simplest of which is a partisan one. Tennessee was in the midst of a larger trend in the South, where the state was growing more and more Republican over time. . . . Gore's problem in Tennessee wasn't the gun issue, it was
something much simpler: he needed more Democrats in a state that was trending Republican.
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Nevertheless, the easy “conventional wisdom” about guns being the reason for Gore's loss in 2000 grew, inspiring the political commentator Jules Witcover to observe that “the question now is whether this perception will make lambs out of previous anti-gun Democratic lions in Congress.”
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Waiting to shepherd any Democratic gun control lambs was Matt Bennett (quoted above on the panic after the 2000 election). He and a handful of other recycled Clinton-Gore and New York Democratic political operatives announced a new organization, Americans for Gun Safety (AGS), in October 2000. AGS was underwritten with an enormous infusion of cash from the late billionaire Andrew McKelvey, then CEO of the employment search firm TMP Worldwide. Bennett worked in the Clinton White House, first for Vice President Al Gore, then as Clinton's liaison to state governors.
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The AGS president, Jonathan Cowan, had been chief of staff to Andrew Cuomo during the latter's tenure as Clinton's secretary of housing and urban development.
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In 2001 the group was joined by Jim Kessler, a legislative aide to Senator Charles Schumer. Kessler became AGS's director of policy and research.
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