With union help Democrats finesse the gun issue in 2008
December 1, 2008

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

When the communists won control of China after World War Two, many Americans, especially conservatives, wondered how people could trade their freedom for bread.

Anyone who was still wondering in 2008 got the answer. The presidential and congressional races this year were all about bread: the economics of survival. The rice bowls of many Americans had been broken.

Yes, there also was a lot of latent resentment to the prolonged war in Iraq, a war that quickly lost what public support it had in the beginning as the cost to our treasure of youth and financial resources mounted. However, the biggest problem was the economy. People who had been buffeted by the high cost of energy, especially for homes and vehicles, skyrocketing health care costs, the loss of jobs, declining home values, the higher cost of food and losses to their retirement accounts and nest-eggs blamed President Bush and, by association, a lot of Republicans.

That Bush did not necessarily cause all of those problems was ignored. That Democrats played a significant role in the decisions that created the problems was ignored—or at least quickly forgotten. That the Democrats had been in charge of Congress for the last two years was another quickly forgotten memory.

A majority of the voters blamed Bush and took it out on his party’s candidate.

That the general media had been pushing a Democrat victory since 2004, if not 2000, didn’t help. First they lionized Hillary Clinton, and when she lost the nomination, the media quickly hopped behind the Obama bandwagon and pushed as hard as they could.

The media treated John McCain, the war hero that used to be one of their favorites in the Senate, with some diffidence, but they piled on when it came to his surprise vice presidential choice, Sarah Palin of Alaska. In fact, it appeared that many within the McCain campaign probably assisted by providing the media with tips and guides to what might help batter Palin some more.

When it came to Barack Obama, the media glossed over, downplayed, or simply ignored some of the problems in his background.

The story about the federal lawsuit over Obama’s birth certificate filed by a Philadelphia Democrat who was previously a Hillary Clinton supported was ignored. The suit was designed to test Obama’s natural citizenship qualification, but nobody seemed to care. There may have been no merit to the suit, but still it was sloughed off by the Obama campaign, and by many other people. Nobody seemed to care.

And even the gun issue got finessed by the Democrat strategists, their allies in the major labor unions and anti-gun groups masquerading as pro-hunting conservationists. Their strategy was simple: deceit.

Gun Week had informed you during recent months and the past few years that the Democrats had figured out that “gun control” was a big political liability and that it had cost them dearly in many key states, even among union members who would have voted the labor ticket in past elections, if not for their guns and the Second Amendment. The Democrats knew it had cost their party dearly in past elections, especially the 1994 congressional races that lost them control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. They also knew that restricting or abolishing gun ownership was a key tenet of the liberal Democrat core.

While the party had been working with union leadership and some gun control organizations for many months in an effort to finesse the gun issue, they went even farther in this campaign. The unions allied themselves with the American Hunting and Shooting Association (AHSA), a recently organized group heavily laced with hunter elitists and outright gun banners that was packaged as a “moderate” pro-hunting group that would lobby for the Democratic presidential ticket.

Working with AHSA, the unions stumped for Hillary Clinton in their journals when they thought she might be the candidate. Then they switched to Obama.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign also remembered the 1994 elections, and they knew they were going to get strong opposition from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other pro-gun groups. So they had him repackage himself as a “pro-Second Amendment candidate.” Details of his allegiance to the right to keep and bear arms were always sketchy at best, and his past anti-gun record—along with that of his Scranton, PA-born running mate, Joe Biden—continued to haunt their campaign.

He was even forced to say in some usually pro-gun states that he would not take away people’s rifles, shotguns and handguns. Those gunowners and would-be gunowners who didn’t believe him went out and started buying a lot of guns as insurance, even before he was elected. When the Obama-Biden ticket did win the election, even more dubious Americans went out and bought more guns. Just as Bill Clinton’s anti-gun policies proved to be a boon to the gun industry, Obama is helping sales.

But for all of the “Obama factor” gun sales, he gained victory by deceiving many voters, especially those in the labor unions, who had often in the past subjugated their economic interests to their right to keep and bear arms.

They were deceived by the slick union magazines which promoted Obama as a pro-Second Amendment candidate while focusing on jobs and health care as the key economic journals. The Obama-Biden picture on the cover of the Sheet Metal Workers Journal before the election is very similar to the on this post-election issue of Gun Week. Not only did they promote his candidacy in The Journal’s editorial pages, they also promoted the filibuster-proof Senate majority.

This was not the only big union effort to promote Obama, there was more to come.

The AFL-CIO came up with an e-mail and print campaign featuring their version of McCain’s Joe the Plumber. His name is Mike Day and he was featured in the final union-Obama advertising campaign designed to complete the deceit.

We have reproduced the cover of that post-card and e-mail message to union workers. You can see how the message is packaged. It promises not only to address the crucial economic crises, but to protect your right to keep and bear arms.

Well, the Obama-Biden ticket won on Nov. 4. In January, they will take office.

It will be interesting to see if they Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid remember the 1994 election as well as their victory in 2008.
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