Were gun laws his downfall in 1994? (cc photo: Thomas Shahan)
There are perhaps plenty of lessons in the (most recent) Senate failure to pass even modest new restrictions/regulations on gun ownership. But one lesson needs to be resisted: The idea that passing a more expansive gun control law in 1994 came back to bite Democrats in the midterm elections.
That theory was presented as fact by Jennifer Steinhauer of the New York Times (4/18/13):
But after the vote for the assault weapons ban cost Democrats seats in 1994, red-state Democrats have steered clear of gun safety measures, judging that the political fury of opponents would not be offset by support from those who favor tighter controls.
If the cause of Democrats’ ’94 electoral losses were that clear, then obviously they’d want to keep their distance from anything like that. But we re guns really the issue in 1994? Plenty of analysts think not; this U.S. News & World Report (1/17/13) runs down some of the research, which points out that most of the seats lost were in Republican-leaning districts, and there were a number of other big issues–including the healthcare debate, NAFTA and a soft economy. Writing in the American Prospect (2/22/12), Paul Waldman took a look at some of these NRA myths.
And on the New York Times editorial page (5/9/09), Dorothy Samuels wrote:
It is hard to make a case that the assault weapons ban was decisive in 1994.
The law certainly enraged many NRA members and might explain the loss of certain Democratic seats. However, there were other major factors in the Democrats’ 1994 loss, starting with perceived Democratic arrogance and corruption. (Overdrafts at the House bank came to symbolize that.)
Add to that voter unhappiness with Mr. Clinton’s budget, his healthcare fiasco, the Republican Party’s success in recruiting appealing candidates, and that ingenious Republican vehicle for nationalizing the elections known as the “Contract With America.” The contract, by the way, did not mention guns.
As Waldman argues, the people who most loudly champion the electoral power of the National Rifle Association are the National Rifle Association. These mythologies shouldn’t be treated as facts.
It’s not just the corpress that promotes these fantasies, is it?
Democrats portray them as facts as well, in order to claim that “political realities” prevent them from pushing for policies that poll after poll reveal are backed by the majority of Americans.
The actual “political reality” is that the Democratic Party’s function is to provide a pantomime of populism, to create the illusion that there is some fundamental difference between the two major parties
When time and again its rhetoric is antithetical to its actions.
I think you’re making a fundamental error. Any political party, operates by reference to a roughly defined set of principles. Is there anyone that doesn’t recognize that the democratic party has such principles? Is there anyone that doesn’t even have a rudimentary idea, what the difference is, between the principles set forth in the democratic, compared with the principles of the republican party? Either you agree that political parties have these princples, or you don’t. If you agree, then you can’t say that the dem and the republican parties are the same, can you? What you can say, is that there are sham democrats, deceitful and cynical scondrels, that have no intention of standing up for the principles of the party to which they pretend allegiance. A political party is an abstraction, it can’t deceive us. The people that occupy seats in that party are the deceitful ones. The reality is, that there are few, genuine democrats, most are frauds. It also doesn’t matter how exalted is the officeholder, when it comes to this fraudulence. A so-called democratic president can learn the art of trading a critical and all-important democratic principle, for a lesser one, on which he appears to stand firm. A brilliant subterfuge, that succeeds in fooling nearly everyone.