Newtown Updated: Obama wins the public debate but loses the Senate vote. NRA wins the battle but may yet lose the war

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.”