Bloomberg’s White Whale | National Review Online
By Charles C. W. Cooke 8-13-14
The former mayor’s quest to slay the Second Amendment proves elusive once again.
There is something of Captain Ahab about Michael Bloomberg these days — the former mayor of New York having adopted the profile of a neurotic and fevered old man whose long and checkered career has not yet managed to sate him, and whose ambition will be truly realized only when, finally, he captures his whale and avenges his bruised ego. Alas, yesterday evening, in Milwaukee, Wis., satisfaction eluded him once again, that Milwaukee County’s Sheriff David Clarke — an outspoken apostle of the right to keep and bear arms, and opponent of all that Bloomberg holds dear — winning his primary and overcoming a concerted and expensive attempt to unseat him. This one, Bloomberg had said through an intermediary, was “personal.” One suspects that the loss will be taken hard.
Like so many who share his distaste for the Second Amendment and its apologists, Bloomberg is still laboring under the rotten misapprehension that his political opponents’ advantage is tactical and financial rather than structural and philosophical. But the simple and unsexy truth is that Sheriff Clarke managed to withstand the attempt to unseat him for precisely the same reason as have others who have found themselves in his position: not because he has allied himself with shady and wealthy figures, but because he was defending a basic civil right, and because that civil right is popular. Insofar as the much lamented “gun lobby” had an effect on the race at all, its role, like Michael Bloomberg’s, was to inform the voting public as to where the candidates stood on the issues. That public evidently preferred Clarke’s stance.
’T was ever thus. For decades now, the National Rifle Association and its backers have demonstrated in no uncertain terms that there are electoral and political consequences in store for those who would meddle with voters’ unalienable right to self-defense. The most famous of the Right’s recent victories came in Colorado, where formerly apolitical residents reacted to the passage of an unworkable background-check regime and an arbitrary limit on the size of magazines by recalling three of the lawmakers who had spearheaded the changes. This, perhaps, was Bloomberg’s most stinging defeat. But it was not an aberration. Last November, Bloomberg elected to involve himself in mayoral races in the states of North Carolina, Florida, and Pennsylvania — not merely backing and bankrolling gun-controlling candidates in all three states, but slamming their pro–Second Amendment challengers, too. Not a single one of his chosen candidates prevailed. In Virginia’s 34th House of Delegates district, meanwhile, he loudly backed Kathleen Murphy, a Democrat who transformed her race into a referendum on firearms law. Murphy lost. Officials in Virginia, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd reported, were irritated by Bloomberg’s interference, many going so far as to wonder aloud whether he was becoming a liability. For his part, New York’s senior Democratic senator, Chuck Schumer, suggested that Bloomberg’s scheme was “not effective.”
Sheriff Clarke’s defeat, then, was to be the victory that turned the tide — the example that Bloomberg needed to make the case that taking a hard-line stance in favor of gun rights is a recipe for electoral disaster. …
-go to link-
No comments:
Post a Comment