Re: yet another US electile disfunction commentary

["Nathan Newman" <nathan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Actually, Gore did drop most of his gun control rhetoric by the end of the
campaign.  Remember, he actually attacked Bradley from the gun rights side
of the debate during the primary because Bradley wanted to register all
guns.   Gore could have gone farther in repudiating the gun control folks,
but he spent a lot of the fall telling hunters that he would not touch their
guns in any way and ran away from every gun control question in the debates.
The unions spent a good chunk of their turnout energy telling their members,
in a nice little slogan I saw, "Al Gore doesn't want to take away your gun,
but George Bush wants to take away your union."

I tend to be pretty skeptical of gun control as a solution to crime in any
case, since economic factors are far more important.  And it's a little too
late to get all the guns off the streets in any case.  So if progressive
Dems did want to play "Survivor" among the various Democratic voting groups,
I would definately vote Handgun Control Inc. off the progressive island and
try to get more NRA union folks back.

-- Nathan Newman

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Devine" <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2000 5:40 PM
>Subject: [PEN-L:4622] yet another US electile disfunction commentary


It was interesting to read Katha Pollitt's  "Don't Blame Ralph" column in
the recent issue of the US-based NATION magazine and Doug Henwood's LBO
postmortem on the (alas!) not-dead-yet election. As they point out, Gore
should be held responsible for his own (possible) loss. After all, 10% of
those willing to admit to being Democrats said "let George do it" on
election day, while Uncle Albert couldn't even carry his own state,
Tennessee.

There's a problem with this. From what I've heard, the reason why Gore lost
Tennessee is that he was "too liberal." That suggests that if he had told
the leftists and the liberals to go f*ck themselves (while scaring them
about how Bush was Attila's long-lost son, so they'd better vote for the
lesser of two evils) even more than he did, he might have carried a bigger
percentage of the vote, taking Tennessee, so that vote counts in Florida
would be irrelevant.

But there was an alternative: Gore could have decided to tell the
pro-gun-control people "it's enough to enforce current laws, so we don't
need new laws." It's true that this is Bush's line, but there's a lot of
truth to it (especially if it's Gore rather than Bush who's doing the
enforcing). This strategy does to the pro-gun-control constituency what
Gore actually did to the labor movement and the African-American community.
However, it would make Gore more successful in a lot of places like
Tennessee -- and with many rank-and-file workers. There was an article in
the L.A. TIMES before the election started about how unionized workers in
the middle west were torn between pro-union loyalties and opposition to gun
control.

I know that it's a worthless parlor game to do Monday morning
quarter-backing for a bunch of political sleazoids like those running the
Gore campaign. But here's the punch line: why is it that the
Clinton/Gore/Lieberman (DLC) tradition always uses the "love it or leave
it" (lesser-of-two-evils) mind-f*ck on the labor movement, the minority
communities, the committed liberals, the last dregs of the New Deal
coalition, rather than on the pro-gun-control folks? It's because of the
class position and stance of the whole dominant wing of the Democrat party.
But you knew that.

(I've decided that the Republican are quite right to not call their
opponents the "Democratic Party" since the latter organization is hardly in
favor of democracy. Both parties see it as at best a necessary evil.)
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine