By Charles Hayslett
CEO, Hayslett Group
In the
wake of the U.S. Senate’s failure last week to pass an expanded background
check law, I’ve been looking for an opportunity (and the time) to update my
running commentary on the way the gun control debate has unfolded since
Newtown.
This is
one time I’m glad I dragged my feet, because it’s only in the last 24 hours that
I’ve seen a couple of pieces of commentary that I think are useful, and they
speak to two of the five topics I said would be important to watch in this
debate. The first is sustained political leadership. I wrote following the Sandy Hook massacre
that President Obama would have to put the issue front and center and keep it
there, and initially it looked like that was happening.
But
after the Senate failed last week to muster the 60 votes necessary to keep
Manchin-Toomey moving forward, the country rightly asked who dropped the
ball. In Sunday’s New York Times,
Maureen Dowd gave us the right answer with a scalding column that fairly placed
the blame at the president’s feet.
“It’s
unbelievable,” she wrote, “that with 90 percent of Americans on his side,
(Obama) could get only 54 votes in the Senate. It was a glaring example of his
weakness in using leverage to get what he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is
scared of him.”
But if
Obama was unable to channel an inner LBJ and strong-arm 60 votes out of the
Senate, that doesn’t mean the fight is over or that the issue is settled. Indeed, other powerful actors – New York Mayor
Mike Bloomberg and former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords – look like they’re in
it for the long haul, and there were a handful of comments on today’s “Morning
Joe” on MSNBC that seemed salient, maybe even prescient.
U.S.
Senator Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania), who ordinarily opposes gun control measures
but flipped after Newtown, had this to say: “I do think the next election, the
next election cycle, will create a dynamic we’ve never seen. You won’t have a one-sided argument. You’re going to have funded television ads,
you’re going to have funded campaigns against candidates, and that will change
the dynamic as much as the tragedy and the intensity of the moment.”
That
same exchange on “Morning Joe” generated a couple of comments that go to one of
the other issues I identified in my original Newtown blog in December: How the NRA and its allies respond.
This
from program co-host Joe Scarborough, a former pro-gun GOP congressman from
Florida: “By the way, this is going to be a perfect case study 10 years from
now. You overreach. You go all in on an issue you should probably
let go pass. Sometimes you’ve got to let
issues pass … you’ve got to choose your fights.
And the NRA didn’t do it, and they lied, time and time and time
again. And it’s not just 90 percent of
Americans that they offended, they offended … a majority of members of the
NRA.”
To
which Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a
Morning Joe regular, added: “We’ll look
back on it one day and people will question whether the slippery slope fit into
the wedge argument, which basically informs everything the NRA does. Whether that was the right strategy, or
whether it would have been smarter to say, look, we agree to this kind of gun
control, but that’s where the ceiling is.
Whether that in the long run would have been a smarter tactic, because
ultimately by basically saying any gun control is unacceptable they could lose control over the debate, and if and when that day happens they may rue their
strategy of their all or nothing approach.”
