NRA’s Endorsement Wins Don’t Count, But Brady’s Do!
The lack on intellectual honesty in the two stories I’m about to compare drives me nuts.
This first bit is from an article during the NRA Annual Meeting. Responding to the fact that the NRA just turned out more than 66,000 people to rally for gun rights and the fact that 85% of the NRA-PVF endorsed candidates won their races, Paul Helmke said:
But Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said those numbers are misleading. He said most of those races included safe incumbents, and the NRA struggled in expensive battleground campaigns.
“They’ve never been as strong as they pretended to be,” said Helmke.
So Paul has decided to lead by doing, right? He’s going to show just how powerful the Brady’s are and that they are willing to stake their name on a truly challenging campaign in a state that so desperately “needs” gun control according to their grades.
Frank Lautenberg today received the endorsement of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
“But, Bitter, you’re ignoring all of those other announcements we made during the week that you didn’t catch the press on,” says Peter Hamm. Right? Uhh…no.
In case either of you are vanity Googling, could you please pretend next time? Take a leap of faith for your cause. See what happens. Of course, expect us to laugh when it fails. But at least pretend to take a challenge or live up to your own standards for what you think the NRA should be doing. Pretend to lead by example.
No obviously related posts.
[...] Well, ours is bigger. [...]
Helmke is a joke. You can see the defeat in his eyes… He just knows he’s wrong.
Actually, I don’t think he’s a joke. I think they’ve done a much better job at getting him out in the press and aligning him with Democrats who would be eager to jump on board if they thought the words “gun control” wouldn’t lose elections for them.
They may not be winning right now, but they are building alliances that could be dangerous should we have a President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid who is unwilling to put the brakes on what the other two want to do.
Maybe he’s not a joke…but his countenance is screaming…”Please believe me….I’m not crazy, I promise, guns kill GUNS KILL. PLEASE DON”T SEE RIGHT THROUGH MY RHETORIC”.
Just my $0.02
Bitter, I hate to point out to you that Helmke is right, NRA’s endorsements don’t mean much.
You should apologise to Paul!
Here’s the facts-
Five of the seven largest independent expenditures made by the NRA in the 2000 Senate elections were for candidates who lost. Those losers were among the NRA’s best buddies: John Ashcroft (lost to a dead guy), Rod Grams, Spencer Abraham, Slade Gorton, and Bill McCollum.
In U.S. House races, seven of the nine largest independent expenditures by the NRA were for candidates who lost. Six of the seven gubernatorial candidates endorsed by the NRA lost in 2000, too.
Voters in Colorado and Oregon had a direct say on closing the so-called “gun show loophole,” they rejected the NRA’s position and approved both measures by large margins.
NRA members ran 52 get-out-the-vote phone banks — all on behalf of Republican candidates.
The NRA did not endorse a single Democratic candidate in a competitive House or Senate race.
By a ratio of 317-to-1, the NRA spent its independent expenditure money on Republicans in 2000.
The NRA also made huge soft money donations to the national Republican Party apparatus (perhaps that’s why the NRA is so hostile to Sen. John McCain’s campaign finance reforms).
And of course, Gore won more of the popular vote than NRA backed Bush.
Fast forward to 2006-
In the wake of the Republican Party losing control of the U.S. House and Senate, the National Rifle Association suffered its “biggest election disaster in nearly 15 years” according to the NRA’s own election materials. In its magazines and in member communications leading up to the 2006 midterm elections, the NRA repeatedly warned that its “pro-Second Amendment House of Representatives” was at stake. And in a direct-mail appeal sent out in July 2006, the NRA’s Political Victory Fund declared that “you and I could be headed for our biggest election disaster in nearly 15 years” if Democrats were to take control of one or both Houses of Congress.
In addition to the House turnover, NRA-backed Senate candidates lost key races included Rick Santorum (R-PA), Jim Talent (R-MO), Mike Bouchard (R-MI), and Michael Steele (R-MD) George Allen (R-VA) and Conrad Burns (R-MT).
You remember that AHSA took on the NRA in rural Missouri in the McCaskill v.Talent US Senate race. When the returns came in from Missouri the Democrats had not only won the House but also the Senate. And the coup de grace, Chris Cox admitting in NRA’s flagship political publication First Freedom that AHSA had kicked their ass.
I think your bitter side is really starting to cloud your very well educated mind!
http://therighttobeararms.info/?p=130
I thought I heard something slithering through the grass. Welcome back Bob
But Bob, look at the Democrats who are winning. John Tester in Montana, Jim Webb in Virginia, Robert Casey in Pennsylvania. Webb even threw a fit that NRA didn’t post his grade, because he wanted people to know he was a gun guy. In those three cases the incumbent got the endorsement by policy, not by grade. It’s easier for gun owners if the guy running against the incumbent is A rated. Hell, even I voted for Bob Casey because Santorum’s social conservatism got to be too much for me.
Bob, are you ignoring the think tank research that shows NRA’s endorsements do make a difference?
Sebastian, so you agree with Helmke that the NRA endorsement does not have much impact because they generally endorse safe incumbents (Burns, Santorum and Allen)? Seems like you and Bitter differ on this point.
Their policy, as best as I understand it, is if you have an A rated incumbent and an A rated challenger, the incumbent gets the endorsement. The endorsement system favors incumbency, because it would be foolish for it not to. Incumbents tend to have seniority, better committee seats, and they also tend to beat challengers more often than not, and the incumbent might just get a little pissy if you yank support if he’s been behind you.
What I’m pointing out is the Democrats have been unseating endorsed incumbents with pro-gun challengers, which, yes, I do believe weakens the power of the endorsement when people can see John Tester, for instance, is A rated.
So, Sebastian, how do you explain a MCCain endorsement by NRA, if Tester, Webb, Casey, Richardson, etc. and a couple of dozen pro-gun state legislators (including several who head up their state’s sportsmens caucus like in Montana and Pennsylvania) endorse and work for Obama? Is that going to impact their “A” rating? Should it?
NRA has endorsed McCain? That’s news to me. The grade, in my opinion, should be based on their record on the gun issue, not on political issues such as who they feel they want to endorse politically. Consider that Ed Rendell, who is not too well liked by a lot of the pro-gun western Democrats in Pennsylvania, pushed hard for Hillary here. The Obama endorsement could have just been a fuck you to the Governor, without crapping on the party. I don’t know how closely a lot of these guys looked at Obama’s record.
I would also note that Obama went down pretty hard in Pennsylvania, more than was anticipated pre-”bitter” comment, and also went down pretty hard in West Virginia and Kentucky, and lost in Indiana, where there are a significant pro-gun Democratic constituency.
That’s not to say Hillary is the gun owner’s best friend, but she’s been playing the issue a lot smarter than Barack Obama.
Bob,
Could you define for me what an “Assault Weapon” is?