Your liberal is old, our liberal is new
The LA Times says the old liberals (you know, the dumb ones) will be duking it out with the new ones:
After toppling the long-dominant Republicans, the Democratic Party’s incoming congressional leaders have found themselves in another difficult struggle – with their own supporters.
Some of the very activists who helped restore the Democrats to a majority in the House and Senate last week are claiming credit for the victories and demanding their due: a set of ambitious – and politically provocative – actions on gun control, abortion, national security and other issues that party leaders fear could alienate moderate voters and leave Democrats vulnerable to GOP attacks as big spenders or soft on terrorism.
The Democrats are going to have to deal with their internal issues. More:
Similar vows are coming from lobbyists for abortion rights, who want to expand family-planning options for poor women and scale back Bush’s focus on abstinence education, and from gun-control advocates, who hope to revive a lapsed ban on assault weapons. Labor unions, a core Democratic constituency, are demanding universal health care and laws discouraging corporations from seeking cheap labor overseas.
A lot of those pretty new seats you guys have went to pro-gun Dems. I wouldn’t go pushing a ban on weapons that look like assault weapons. See:
At the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the leading gun-control advocacy group, Paul Helmke has high hopes for the assault-weapons ban – and he, too, can list races where candidates backed by his organization defeated those supported by the National Rifle Association.
But Helmke, the Brady Campaign’s president and a former Republican mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind., acknowledged that his challenge is to persuade potentially squeamish Democrats that his cause is not “radioactive.”
Many Democratic strategists have come to believe that supporting gun-control laws alienates rural voters and many independents. “Guns are a tricky issue,” Helmke said. “But the elections show there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
You’re half right. The elections were still close and there was only about 6% turnover. I wouldn’t go betting the farm that guns won’t cost the Democrats again, like it did in 1996 after the passage of the assault weapons ban. Remember, even Clinton conceded that:
On November 8th, we got the living daylights beat out of us, losing eight Senate races and fifty-four House seats, the largest defeat for our party since 1946….The NRA had a great night
Don’t go there, guys.
November 13th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Like I’ve said before, there’s going to be a messy fight for control of the Democrat Party. It will be fun to watch.
Pass me some popcorn.
November 13th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
Isn’t it funny that the Democrats are having a knock down drag out fight and their supporters can only say Carville is crazy and we are not fighting. Maybe it is just a spirited discussion? Better check the guns and knives at the door.
If this was a soap opera would it be called, “Days of our “Reality Based” Lives?
Watch the new Dean libs attack Carville as the crazy uncle. It’s coming.
November 14th, 2006 at 10:10 am
Depending on what you mean by “a lot” and “pro-gun,” I agree. Off the top of my head, I can only think of two myself, Tester and Webb, which is nowhere near enough to make up for the RINOs who voted for the AW ban in 1994 and to renew it in 2004. Don’t forget, even the nominally Republican Senate in ’04 had enough not-so-pro-gun votes to renew the AW ban, which was stalled in the House. Does anyone seriously doubt the votes are there now?
It never hurts to give good advice, I suppose, but there’s little danger that this advice will be heeded. If the Dems were going to learn any pro-gun lessons from the 1994 election, they would have learned those lessons in 1994, or maybe in 1995, 1996 at the latest. Instead, federal harassment of law-abiding gun owners and frivolous suits against gun manufacturers continued unabated for the remainder of Clinton’s term. There’s no reason to expect the Democrats to be any more sensible now.