The Last Gun
Page 22
The omnibus crime bill on which Democrats now hung their hopes was a wallowing $30 billion tub. “With the bulk of a Tolstoy novel, this 960-page monster includes something for everyone,” the National Journal reported.68 “The law includes a sprawling array of programs, many of them untested, that taken together have little overall coherence,” reported the New York Times. “It reflects the ideological divisions that had stymied Congressional efforts to enact a crime bill for years as well as the pet projects of legislators whose votes were needed to pass it at last.”69 On the eve of the final vote in the House of Representatives, the bill’s cargo included the assault weapons ban, a revived federal death penalty, and grants to help local governments hire a hundred thousand police officers. It was also packed with federal funds for crime prevention programs.
The original youth-programs amendment to the crime bill, introduced by Senator Chris Dodd, a Democrat, called for $1 billion of funding for one program.70 By the time the Senate passed its version of the bill, the package had grown to $3.8 billion and a dozen programs. The House version ballooned up to $6.6 billion and even more programs. The funding topped out at $7 billion and twenty-eight programs after the House and Senate reconciled their bills in conference.71 These programs came to be lumped under the phrase “midnight basketball,” an image charged with social and racial subtext.
Passage of the reconciled conference crime bill was predicted to be “an easy win for Clinton and a certain campaign trophy for Democrats.”72 But on August 11, 1994, the conference report suffered a surprise in the House. Republicans and recalcitrant Democrats voted down a procedural rule that would have brought the bill to the House floor for a final vote.73 Such “special rules,” issued by the House Rules Committee, specify the length of debate on substantive bills and detail other procedural matters.74 When such a rule is defeated, consideration of the underlying bill halts until a revised or new rule is approved.75
“Democrats were so stunned at their loss that they could hardly explain their gross miscalculation,” reported the New York Times.76 President Clinton was described as “very nearly sputtering with shock and anger.”77
What had gone wrong?
According to contemporary post mortems, the bloated prevention programs, which had grown from $ 1 billion to $7 billion, were the fulcrum that gave the bill’s opponents—who had a wide variety of motives, including opposition from the left to a federal death penalty provision—the leverage to bring it to a halt. Certainly, the NRA was doing all it could to rip the assault weapons ban out of the bill. But the ban had so much public support that President Clinton insisted that it stay in the crime bill during the next two weeks of frantic negotiation to resuscitate it.78
The Washington Post reported that the bill’s opponents “have turned the debate over the final version of the crime bill into a debate on the merits of the prevention programs, which they denounce as ‘social welfare’ and ‘pork.’ “79 The New York Times saw the same dynamic. “The bill was much ridiculed for spending money on dance programs, arts and crafts, midnight basketball leagues and programs to promote self-esteem,” it reported.80 A lengthy analysis in the New Yorker traced the roots of the rout to radio rants by the right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh, who “had been hammering away at the crime bill—not as much on its anti-gun provisions as on the social programs it contained.”81
Limbaugh and other talk-radio hosts “plainly struck a chord and excited an antipathy toward the crime bill.”82 As a result, casting a vote against the bill lost the sting of its being seen as soft on crime by conservative voters. House minority whip Newt Gingrich asked conservative polling consultant Frank Luntz for a read on public opinion. Luntz’s poll confirmed the wisdom of attacking the prevention programs. Those polled, he wrote, “are far more concerned that convicted criminals remain behind bars than teenagers in inner cities learn to ball-room dance and slam dunk from the foul line by the pale moonlight.” Luntz advised Republican members, “If you want to oppose this legislation, you should.”83
Two weeks later, Democrats got their crime bill, slightly pared down. The bill included the assault weapons ban.84 The president signed the bill into law on September 13, 1994.85 Republicans, however, were conspicuous by their absence from the signing ceremony86 Newt Gingrich and his party’s strategists had gained a valuable insight into the public mood.
On September 27, he and more than three hundred Republican lawmakers and candidates stood on the steps of the Capitol and announced their commitment to a ten-point Contract with America.87 They said they would run a campaign focused on its promises, and would implement the contract’s laundry list if they regained the majority in Congress. Frank Luntz had “market tested the message like a breakfast cereal.”88 The Republican “contract” promised a tougher “anti-crime package,” the “Taking Back Our Streets Act.”89 But significantly, the legislation did not propose repeal of the assault weapons ban or the Brady law.90
The NRA was reported to have spent about $4 million in the 1994 midterm campaign, including a battery of television ads in which Charlton Heston attacked specific Democrats who had voted for the Brady and assault weapons bills.91 The NRA’s funds went “overwhelmingly to support Republican congressional candidates,”92 evidencing its embryonic “culture war” alliance with the right wing.93
Democrats woke up to disaster the morning of Wednesday, November 9, 1994. Riding “a tidal wave of voter discontent,” Republicans had taken control of the Congress, winning their first majority in the Senate since 1986, and their first in the House since 1954.94 For the first time since Abraham Lincoln was president, a sitting Speaker of the House, Thomas S. Foley, was rejected by voters in his own district.95 But virtually no one—including President Clinton—blamed the sweeping Democratic loss on the assault-weapons ban or even gun control in general. Clinton accepted some of the blame, saying his agenda of change had not moved fast enough. But “he drew the line on any turning back against gun control and the banning of assault weapons, two pieces of legislation he was able to get through Congress this year.”96
The New York Times opined that morning that it was “easy to see why the Democrats got whacked.”97 Adding to “the sour national attitude toward politics generally and the rebellion against incumbents in particular,” the Times wrote, “failure of governance must be laid at the feet of the retiring Senate majority leader, George Mitchell; the embattled Speaker, Thomas Foley, and a leadership team that placed loyalty to them above cooperation with the White House or public demands for Congressional and campaign finance reform.”98 The Boston Globe reported that “throughout the nation, voters complained about a bickering Congress, bloated government and what one described as ‘a cream puff president who had made many hopeful promises but had produced little.”99
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.”100 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.”101
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.”102 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 s
quashed 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.”103 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.104 In October the conservative Weekly Standard reported that “some conservatives are getting tired of the National Rifle Association.”105
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.106
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.108
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.”110
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.111 “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.”112 Roger Stone—a self-described “GOP hitman”113—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.’ ”114
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.”115
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.116
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.”117
The advertisements were the work of prominent members of Clinton’s golden triangle—consultants Bob Squier and Dick Morris.118 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.”119
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.”120 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.”121
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 politica
l 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 2007.122
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 2003.123 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.124