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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gamesmistress who wrote (24179)	1/13/2004 2:22:03 PM
From: DMaA	Respond to of 793955

There's nothing "mainstream" about the mainstream media. I think elite media is more accurate.

To: gamesmistress who wrote (24179)	1/13/2004 2:43:03 PM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793955

Gina, FWIW, it seems the deaniacs have the same problem with the liberal media as conservatives. Apparently liberals have to be of a certain strata or class to interest the elite. It is kind of ironic, no? They just don't like in your face politics whether it comes from bush or dean. They like civilized pols like that frenchman, kerry or that great military mind, clark. As Mr. Spock used to say, Fascinating. mike

To: gamesmistress who wrote (24179)	1/13/2004 8:03:42 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793955

David Keene - The Right View "The Hill" Gun issue could cost Democrats the White House again Liberal Democrats in Congress are getting ready to force their party’s presidential nominee down the same road that led to the defeat of Al Gore and his running mate four years ago. In the days following the 2000 election, a number of Democrats realized that their fixation on guns and gun owners had cost their candidates millions of votes that year. Even before leaving office, President Bill Clinton warned that the “gun issue” and the efforts of the National Rifle Association (NRA) had cost Gore five states that he might otherwise have won and, thus, the election. Labor leaders began urging the party to “get the gun issue off the table” after watching droves of their own members desert Democrats they were afraid would restrict their right to own firearms. And Democratic candidates took heed. Candidates two years later began taking to the skeet range and the hunting fields to counter the presumption that as Democrats they were automatically “anti-gun” and a closet enemy of the 2nd Amendment guarantees that so many Americans take seriously. It didn’t work every time, but the ploy seemed at least to take the edge off an issue that threatened even more devastation unless it was, in fact, taken off the table. The irony is that as Democrats prepared for the 2000 elections, many of them believed in their bones that if they could get their candidates to focus on the gun issue and “go after” the NRA, they would win millions of new votes. In those days it was an article of liberal and Democratic faith that most Americans loathe guns and live in fear precisely because guns are legal in this country. It followed that their opposition to what they liked to describe as the “gun culture” would be applauded by an appreciative public and would help their candidates win. Their inability to realize before the votes were counted that they were dead wrong stems from the fact that Democrats and Republicans, or liberals and conservatives, really do live in different worlds. Recent evidence of this comes in the form of data from a poll conducted by John Zogby for Southern Methodist University’s Tower Center and the O’Leary Report. The poll was unique in that Zogby broke down the results by looking at contrasting attitudes in the states that voted for George W. Bush and for Gore four years ago. The data showed on issue after issue that those who live in the so-called “red states” won by President Bush harbor far different beliefs and attitudes than those who live in the “blue states” carried by Gore. Surprisingly, however, the data showed that while more people in the blue states favor new and tougher gun laws than those in the red states, most voters in both groups of states are far more supportive of the right to own firearms than the Democrats suspected. Indeed, only the sorts of urban and campus-based liberals who dominate the leadership of the Democratic Party were found to be as hostile to gun ownership as Gore and his running mate had been in 2000. This late realization may explain why Democratic candidates this year are striving mightily to take the gun issue off the table. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and his supporters tout his generally pro-gun record in Vermont, retired Gen. Wesley Clark assures us that he loves to hunt and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) even gave up his surfboard long enough to be photographed shooting pheasant in Iowa (albeit with a borrowed shotgun). Whether this effort works, however, will depend more on what happens in Congress between now and November and how the Bush administration responds to it than on the candidates’ posturing. During the Clinton years, the Democratic Congress that passed what has come to be known as the “assault weapons ban” consciously or unconsciously planted a land mine that is about to ignite. That law will expire this September unless Congress acts to extend it. The NRA and its supporters are determined to bury the ban for symbolic as well as substantive reasons, and the data suggest that it hasn’t had much effect on anything anyway. But liberals in Congress already are gearing up to extend the ban and add new restrictions on gun ownership. The debate, coming just before the election, will reinject the gun issue into the campaign and could create conditions similar to those that resulted in the Bush victory four years ago. At this point, however, Bush himself is on record as favoring the renewal of the ban, based largely on the position he took back before the votes were counted four years ago and he thought it would be in his interest to take the issue off the table. It is now clear that his interests have changed, but presidential inertia could keep the Democrats from doing themselves in again. David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, is a managing associate with the Carmen Group, a D.C.-based governmental affairs firm.