As 2002 Elections End The 2004 Campaign Begins
December 20, 2002
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
This issue of Gun Week is the last that will be dated in 2002, but not the last that will be published this year. The first two issues dated in January 2003 are still to come for the Gun Week staff.
However, since this may be the last issue that every subscriber received before the Christmas and New Year holidays, we take this opportunity to wish all of our readers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy, Healthy and Safe New Year. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank our many friends and readers who supply us with news clippings, e-mails and faxes that alert our editors to breaking stories from around the nation and across the world.
On the cover of this issue we used the more generic “Happy Holidays” greeting, fully realizing that while Christmas and Kwanza are yet to come, Ramadan and Hanukah end the day after this column is written. Regardless of ethnic or religious traditions, we use this Year End issue to send our best wishes to all of you.
Another thing that ends on Dec. 7—the 61st anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—is the 2002 congressional elections. The balloting on Nov. 5 left the race for the US Senate seat in Louisiana undecided, since no candidate got at least 50% of the vote. So tomorrow, the voters in the Pelican State will choose between the incumbent Democrat, Mary Landrieu, and Republican challenger Suzanne Terrell. When the ballots are counted in that race, the 2002 elections will be officially over, and the starting gate will be raised officially for candidates in the 2004 races.
You and I might shake our heads about 24/7, wall-to-wall, year-in, year-out campaigning, but that’s politics.
Enter Kerry, Stage Left
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-MA) is not being coy about his ambition to obtain the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2004. He has appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to announce that he is forming an official exploratory campaign committee, which will legally allow him to raise funds and campaign without officially announcing that he is actually a candidate for president.
Kerry will not be alone in his quest for his party’s nod. Other Democrats on Capitol Hill have indicated in one way or another that they are also interested in becoming their party’s standard bearer. Among them are people like former Democratic House leader Richard Gephardt (MO) and Sens. Tom Harkin of Iowa and John Edwards of North Carolina. I’m sure there are quite a few more, as well as governors like Gray Davis of California.
Kerry’s voting record on the gun issue is identical to that of the senior senator from his state, Edward M. Kennedy, also a Democrat. In fact, it is hard to find where Kerry and Kennedy differ much on any issue. Whether that record will play well in the early caucus state of Iowa, or in the early New Hampshire primary in 2004, remains to be seen.
One doesn’t have to be as long in the tooth as I am to recall Kennedy’s challenge to then President Jimmy Carter back in 1980. Kennedy’s rejection by the caucusing Iowans, put his campaign back in the bottle.
What happened to Kennedy that year provided the National Democratic Party with one of their first lessons on the gun issue, a lesson that was articulated repeatedly by one of the Kennedy campaign’s managers, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA). It was one of the things that prompted Frank to tell me in an interview for Gun Week, as well as other journalists, that the gun control issue was a losing one for Democrats because it was blocking the party’s agenda on social issues for the elderly, minorities and the poor.
True Blue Voters
Of course, Frank did not change his own personal views or voting record on gun bills. He is not the kind of hypocrite and smarmy politician like others in his party who profess to support the right to keep and bear arms until it comes time to vote on actual legislation. But Frank was among the first Democrats to realize the political liability that an anti-gun record could be, particularly in mid-America—what are generally now labeled “the Blue states.”
That designation comes from the election reports on television news shows in which reporters and commentators show viewers colorful maps of the United States. When they call a state for the Republican candidate it becomes blue on the map; when it is won by the Democrat, it becomes red. During the Bush-Gore race in November 2000, some of the states kept switching back and forth between blue and red.
But it didn’t take anyone long to figure out that while Gore may have won the popular vote by about half-a-million votes, he was losing in more states. The map of the US appeared to be significantly more blue than red and provided a graphic indication that if the parties reflected opposing political philosophies, the Democrats might have greater strength in a smaller number of more populous states, while the Republican strength was greatest in more states representing the people of most of the West, Midwest and South.
The Democrats’ strength appeared to be centered in a few east- and west-coast states, with a few other important states in red. The Republican strength seemed to dominate a majority of the states, thus indicating early on that the Electoral College vote was likely to be different from the popular vote.
Significantly, in those states that ended up in blue, the gun issue was important. It became clear that most voters living in those states were convinced that they possessed a moral and constitutional right to keep and bear arms for protection and recreation, and they were not going to vote for a candidate who held an opposing view.
Many commentators have since linked the bedrock American view on guns and other issues that appeared to link the blue states with the Republican Party—at least for now. That helped explain why—when the vote was as close as it was in several states this November, the victory went mostly to the candidate who was perceived as supporting the individual right to arms. In the end, the Republicans regained control of the Senate and increased their precariously thin majority in the House.
More 2002 Lessons
Democratic candidates made some inroads in the gubernatorial races, but they also lost some humdingers. The Republican candidate for governor in the traditionally Democratic state of Hawaii, Linda Lingle, ended 40 years of Democrat control of that office.
And in Maryland, where the gun issue was front and center, forced there in large part by the Democrat lieutenant governor seeking a bigger job, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the Republican candidate, Robert Ehrlich, regained the governor’s mansion for his party for the first time in more than 35 years.
Meanwhile, Democrats who were pro-gun, or at least had no hostility to guns, won House races all across the country.
Now, the Democrats in the House of Representatives have elected a flagrantly anti-gun liberal San Francisco Democrat to be the leader of their caucus. If Nancy Pelosi uses that leadership position to pursue an anti-gun agenda in Congress, the party might find that it will lose them more votes in 2004, and not just in the “Blue” states.
With this in mind, Kerry, and the other presidential candidates in his party, may want to do more than just claim they support the Second Amendment; they need to pursue a positive agenda that safeguards American lives, and vote for the right to keep and bear arms.
After all, as the 2004 presidential campaign opens, we should remember whose interpretation of the Second Amendment will prevail: that of mainstream America, or the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
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