I suppose it is traditional for Democrats to shoot themselves in the foot by shooting their mouths off. And they’re doing it again. Nancy Pelosi, who is the Minority Leader in the Senate, is seen on TV a lot more often than Party Chairman Governor Howard Dean, and that makes her the national face and voice of the Party. But she is from that bastion of non-moderation, San Francisco. What brings cheers from her constituents doesn’t often fly in front of Blue Dog Democrats or moderates from Ohio or Florida and they don’t really trust her. When she jumped aboard Representative John Murtha’s bandwagon calling for an early withdrawal from Iraq I think she actually hurt his credibility. And she claims to have support from half the congressional Democratic caucus.
But few Democrats from red states are in that caucus. That means the party currently leans heavily toward liberal positions and ideology. But it is precisely in the moderate and conservative Red States that Democrats must win over voters if they are to wrest control of the House, the Senate and the White House from the Right Wing Fundamentalists who have controlled the Republican Party for over a decade. With its image to the left, the Democratic Party surrenders the middle ground to the right.
Front page of the Washington Post today is the story on a memo written by Al From, President of the Democratic Leadership Council and Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster. They remind the party leadership that “…America remains a moderate to conservative country – particularly on economic and security measures.” As an example, says the memo, 54% of voters don’t like the Bush war in Iraq, but they don’t favor an early pullout. “Democrats”, they say, “need to capture the vital center and bring an abrupt halt to what voters see as the party’s drift to the left.”
And Governor Dean has been urging Democrats to let gun control slip off the national agenda, and reduce it as a litmus test for support. His spokesman, Damian LaVera was quoted in yesterday’s Washington Post as saying, “On gun rights we’ve allowed the Republicans to paint us in a way that just doesn’t represent our values” He’s talking about the values of Red state Democrats. As the Post points out, “Democrats’ ability to attract rural voters in the West is the key to their hopes in 2006. In Montana, where Democrats hope to pick up a US Senate seat next year, candidates must be pro-gun to have a chance of winning, said the state’s Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, an avid hunter….”I guess I kind of believe in gun control. You control your gun, and I’ll control mine, “Schweitzer said.
Does this mean that Democrats will be abandoning attempts to lesson gun violence? Actually, it may mean a long overdue rethink of the sixty year old Democratic legislative program of regulating guns themselves, an approach which has consistently failed to achieve any of its goals.
There are about 223 million guns in America, legally owned by approximately 44 million citizens. Every hour four citizens are shot and killed by guns – about 20,000 deaths each year. 28% of all assaults involve guns. Some 341,000 guns are stolen every year, but 4,204,800 new guns are made. Guns of all types are used in over 500,000 assaults each year. And yet, the relationship between guns and crime are one of the least studied aspects of American life. All of the statistics in this paragraph came from F.B.I. and A.T.F. studies funded during 1993 – 95 during debate over the Clinton Crime bill, which required more record keeping to support restrictions on the sale of guns to those with felony convictions and those with a history of mental and emotional disturbance. That was also the last time the Democrats controlled the House and shortly before they lost control of the rest of the government.
Those numbers seem to paint a horrible connection between guns and violence in America, at least until you take a closer look. That huge number of stolen guns actually represents thefts from only 0.9% of gun owners. Not a bad safety record. Given the two hundred twenty-three million guns in the public’s hands, less than 0.022% are used in illegal activities in any given year. That means that the vast majority of all guns are never involved in violence. How does that support further regulation of guns as an effective crime reduction measure? Even the Clinton crime bill, the last major attempt to regulate gun violence, zeroed in on people who use guns, not the guns themselves.
Partly this was because radical attempts to outlaw handguns were simply not likely to pass congress. Even a brilliant idea that cannot become law is just hot air. But one of the other reasons for the shift was a successful Massachusetts law that applied strict sentencing rules for anyone charged with using a gun in a crime – no plea bargains, no probation, no time off for good behavior and no pardons. “You carry a gun, you go to jail.” This law did not result in a reduction in assaults. But it did see a reduction in assaults using guns. It turns out criminals can learn. The Clinton Crime Bill of 1994 reduced assaults using guns by 25%, but it also did not reduce the number of assaults. Could it be that the National Rifle Association had been right all these years, that guns don’t kill people, people do?
But if the emphasis on dealing with gun violence is to shift to the people misusing guns, it should also shift to the people profiting from the misuse of guns. Only 32% of all felons admit to having stolen their last gun – which means most felons buy their guns from dealers who do not follow the law. The Washington D.C. sniper used a Bushmaster rifle he had obtained from a Washington State dealer. He must have stolen it since he had a felony record and the dealer could not have legally sold that gun to him. But the dealer did not report the gun as stolen until after law enforcement, having finally having silenced the gun, traced the serial number back to the dealer.
Knowing that gun had been stolen in Washington State might have led D.C. and Virginia and Maryland police to the suspect weeks earlier, which might have saved lives. But failure to report a stolen gun is not grounds for pulling a dealer’s license, and even after the dealer’s slip shod stock control was revealed, manufacturers continued shipping to him.
Similarly when small suburban dealers sell a large volume of a specific type of gun, profits are clearly being made selling guns to supply street gang arsenals. Gun dealers and manufactures should be our first line of defense against criminals, just as pharmacists and drug stores are our fist line of defense against meth labs. Instead gun dealers and manufacturers of guns are facilitators for the felons who use those guns illegally, and they profit from it.
They should be required to report unusual sales and all thefts promptly.
After all, guns don’t profit from the illegal use of guns, people do.
From, the DLC and Blue Dog Democrats are certainly not people we want to listen to about the direction of the Democratic Party. Their tactics have given us eight years of an incredibly incompetent Bush adminstration. Their notion, apparently one you agree with, that Democrats are losing the center to the wild eyed radical right is currently exactly not what is happening. The center in America is more liberal than the government and the minority that elected it. And because of the lying about Iraq, and the incompetence in all things Bush, more and more Americans in the center are seeing the truth about right wing ideology. The only thing that Americans are “conservative” about is security, and the conservatives have done nothing to make us more secure. They have bankrupted us economically.
From is wrong and a loser of two national elections. Americans in the center want people of character to represent them, and that means that they want people to have principled stands on issues of concern to America. Democrats who try to steal Republicans from the far right are not advocating any principles, just election tactics. This is why From needs to go merrily along to the dustbin of history.
Have you noticed how much you sound like one of the REligous right? You’re either with us or against us. Now you sound like George B. And I must have missed the meeting but when did compromise require surrender?
When did the ability to form a consenses become a sign of weakness?
Let me ask you; What is it that makes Democrats different from Republicans? And I am not talking about abortion rights, or gun control or poverty programs, or aid for the cities, or enviornmentalism….what is the fundamental philosophy from which the Democratic stand on all those issues springs. Are we, in fact, the party that seeks less government in average people’s lives, out of the doctor’s office, out of the classroom, out of scientific lab? But into the board room to protect teh average person from corporate greed? Or are we the party of big government, big enough to stand up to the corporations, big enough to force local governments to treat all children equal? What do we stand for, as a group.
What do you think? I’m not asking to be cute. This is a discussion Democrats should have had ten years ago. Open and honest. What do you think Democrats stand for?
Kimit
When I was a young man, Democrats stood for working people, for privacy, for a fair wage, for a government big enough to mitigate the power of corporations who want to pay as little as possible for labor, to pay little or no benefits, and pass off as much of their risk onto the public as possible. Democrats were far to the left on economic issues and actually somewhat conservative on social issues. The seventies fractured the Democratic Party into a collection of special interest groups: feminists, gays, environmentalists, etc….all of whom had an ax to grind that did not fit with the central economic mission of the Democratic Party.
Howard Dean actually wants the Democratic Party to become the party it was before the fractionalization of the seventies. I’m a baby boomer, a Vietnam war protestor, an old SDS’er. When the anti war movementof the 60’s and 70’s, which grew out of the civil rights movement of the late 40’s and 50’s, lost its self-confidence after the ’68 election, the New Left in America disintegrated into the self-centered hippies and yuppies who are now most likely the foundation of the fucking Republican Party (the party of me now and screw our grandchildren.)
This post rambled around a bit. But the point is that the DLC doe not have anything to do with what to me is the traditional mission of the Democratic Party. The DLC tied our party to corporate money as tightly as the Republican party. If you look at what Clinton did domestically as President, he doesn’t look much different from a Republican (though not the current rabid litter of Republicans.) For example, his domestic agenda of welfare reform did what Republicans had been trying to do for years.
To say all of this is a shortened version: Democrats should look like Paul Wellstone or Byron Dorgan or Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein; not like Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman.
“….what is the fundamental philosophy from which the Democratic stand on all those issues springs. Are we, in fact, the party that seeks less government in average people’s lives, out of the doctor’s office, out of the classroom, out of scientific lab? But into the board room to protect teh average person from corporate greed? Or are we the party of big government, big enough to stand up to the corporations, big enough to force local governments to treat all children equal? What do we stand for, as a group.”
When you said this, you said it well.
I reread your comments. When I used the phrase “people of character” I was not using it as a code word the way the lunactic religious right does. Right wing Christians are not people of character, they are hypocrites. I simply meant someone who has integrity and walks the walk so to speak.
For example, I think that both John McCain and Malcom X are people of character. McCain for how he acted while a prisoner of war, and how he continues to act as a human being when dealing with people who don’t agree with him. Malcom X because he had the strength of character to confront the guy who very likely saved his life, Elihah Muhammed, when Muhammed was acting contrary to what he spoke…..when he was just talkin’ the talk and not walkin’ the walk.
I got you on the first go around. And I actually agree with you. But the next time I have five bucks to donate to a politician, the next time I walk into a polling booth, I am not going to ask how this candidate stands on women’s rights, or free trade, my first and only question will be, is this person a Democart. If so, they’ve got my money and my vote and I will stuff envelopes. I will do whatever it takes to get these lying bastards out of power. See next diary, Democartic mugwumps.
Kimit