Within the Margin

In the end, the margin was what it should have been: a comfortable Democratic victory to hold Senate District 10 and with it control of the Delaware Senate. Stephanie Hansen captured a little more than 58% of the vote compared to just under 41% for John Marino, with the Libertarian candidate grabbing the remaining 1.12%.

As I wrote last night, Democrats held most of the advantages here and had to win. But winning the easy ones has not been the party’s forte of late, and Republicans had the strongest scenario they could ask for: a candidate with an interesting profile and background, who had nearly captured the seat for them in 2014, and who was outspent but with sufficient funds to be competitive.

This was not 2014, though: the enthusiasm gap that cost Democrats so dearly that year was not present in this campaign. Helpfully, we can quantify that: Hansen received 7,314 votes today, compared to her predecessor Bethany Hall-Long’s winning haul of 6,230 votes in 2014. Let that sink in for a moment: the Democratic candidate won over a thousand more votes in a February special election for a state senate seat, with nothing else on the ballot, than in the November 2014 election with U.S. Senate and House seats on the line. While one should never, ever read too much into an individual special election results, it seems reasonable to conclude that the Trump presidency has sharpened the focus of  Democrats at the grassroots level and helped them understand that resistance takes place up and down the ballot. That’s how you get 250 people to turn up and volunteer to canvass for a state legislative race on a wintry Saturday, as Hansen did a few weekends ago. And that’s how you blow past your last general election number in a given district.

There are many miles to go on the way back to respectability for Democrats in our state legislatures. Tom Perez and Keith Ellison, now the chair and deputy chair of the national party, have vowed a bottom-up focus that would make wins like this plenty common in the years to come. Hopefully Stephanie Hansen, her hundreds of volunteers, and over 7,000 voters have taken the first step in a very long process.

Last month, my indoor five-a-side soccer team was languishing near the bottom of the table as the fall/winter season drew to a close. A campaign that had started brightly enough with a decisive win and some encouraging draws had given way to a seemingly endless series of one-goal defeats. The defense (including me) was of middling quality at best, the offense lacked a killer instinct. It was not out of the realm of possibility that we’d finish 17th out of 18, compared to our usual hard-fought mid-table (or just under) placement.We were struggling on all fronts, but our next to last game featured a team one spot below us. Beat them, as just about everyone else had done, and we’d secure 16th with a shot to move up another spot in the final week. Lose, and risk dropping a spot and losing more momentum going into the spring season. Pride was on the line, in other words. There are games you simply have to win.

So naturally I lost my man in the penalty area after a corner and turned around with horror to see him collecting a pass and firing it past a goalkeeper who had worked so many miracles for us all season. That’s my goal, I said, but whatever class I showed in taking the blame didn’t make us feel any better about the 1-0 scoreline. The game stood that way at halftime: we were losing to one of the only two teams that had been worse than us all season.

But it’s a game of two halves, football. We equalized soon after the break and plowed forward with resolve the rest of the way until finally, with two or three minutes to spare, I intercepted a ball in midfield and dashed forward. Spotting my workhorse teammate Ronald – a man who carries the pain of his native Ecuador’s massive 2016 earthquake with him onto the pitch and inspires me to do better, or at least try harder – speeding down the left flank, I threaded a perfectly weighted ball past his marker and onto his feet. He took care of the rest with a thunderous strike. 2-1, and it was never in doubt that we’d hold on and see out the victory after that.

***

There are elections you simply have to win. Not because the Delaware legislature is regarded as one of the nation’s most innovative or influential, and not because Democrats are hurting to develop a bench in a state where they have controlled the governorship since 1992 and both U.S. senators since 2000 and the lone U.S. representative since 2010, not to mention most of the other statewide offices for over a decade – on the whole, Democrats are more or less doing just fine in Delaware. Not because the Trump White House will see the result and suspend their assault on immigrants, on health care, on the environment, on civil rights, on the free press.

But because sometimes in life – on the pitch, on the campaign trail – you need a sense of momentum. You need reliability. You need to know that your team can experience a poor run of form but still spy the winnable game…and then actually win it.

That’s Saturday’s Delaware senate special election. Control of the Delaware Senate hinges upon it. They’ve seen a 15-6 majority in 2008 eroded by one seat in each election since. That would have left them up 11-10 after the 2016 elections, except incumbent senator Bethany Hall-Long vacated her seat upon being elected lieutenant governor. So it’s 10-10 right now, pending Saturday’s outcome. Democrats are the side with everything to lose: the First State is one of only six in the country where Democrats control the governorship and both houses of the legislature. They’re the out-party in much of the nation, but this is a seat – and a senate chamber – that they actually have, or had until November.

Let’s be clear: it’s  a Democratic seat. Obama carried it 59%-40% in 2012 (and unofficial calculations show Clinton carrying it 54%-41% last year). But especially in low-turnout special elections, few seats are actually safe if hotly contested, and that’s certainly happening here. John Marino, a retired New York City police officer and current realtor and small business owner, is the GOP candidate. He’s a solid candidate and he’s been close to winning before: in a previous bid for this seat in 2014, he lost only 51%-49%. Democrats are running former New Castle County council president Stephanie Hansen. Both candidates are well-funded, with lots of outside money in the mix: Hansen is getting plenty of support from a Delaware-specific PAC called First State Strong. Marino is getting less money than her but plenty enough to run a race, and far more than the usual Delaware senate race, from the usual mix of anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-tax groups.

Democrats are spending more because they have more to lose, and anyway it’s funny to listen to a guy complain about being outspent by PACs when his party gleefully opposes campaign finance reforms all around the country. Regardless, Marino has enough funds and existing name recognition to be competitive. What he doesn’t have is a party enthused to find some way to strike back at the party of Trump…and he doesn’t have Joe Biden campaigning for him, as Hansen does.

Democrats have everything to lose and nothing to gain…except a touch of momentum, a bit of confidence, and that little spring in their step that would come from knowing that all the resistance efforts are not for naught, and that the decline of party strength in America’s 50 state legislatures is to be arrested and down the road, reversed.

The party could use a little swagger right now.

Yes: I just wanted to be sure that somewhere on the web for all eternity would be an article referencing “the Pataki Moment.” Slate has a delightful piece today about the former governor of New York’s latest attempt to be part of a fun-filled Republican presidential primary saga. And bingo: not because Pataki is showing up at bingo halls to connect with seniors, but because his web presence is poorly managed and thus overrun by internet bingo advertisements. A thing I learned today? The world is full of internet bingo sites – which seem inherently self-contradicting – and they like to advertise on derelict political sites. Not this one, though: Within the Margin is a bingo-free zone, though maybe there’s a business model to be found here…

But I digress. Anyone who’s talked politics with me in recent years has heard me mock this guy’s quadrennial presidential flirtations. You see, I’m too young to really remember much of the Pataki governorship: I just remember him sort of being in and around the 9/11 response, but those are really the Giuliani and Bush “moments.”  And then I remember him preparing to leave office with a 30% approval rating according to the best collegiate pollster in the business. That was the precursor to the Spitzer moment, which went poorly for New York, and it was also the precursor to the first (that I’m aware of, anyway) Pataki presidential campaign “buzz.”

That first foray never became a moment, though we did have Pataki-in-Iowa reporting from the Times. Most notable: Pataki’s desire to visit a country fair. I can relate: I enjoy a good fair. Many trips to Iowa and New Hampshire followed, and presumably many fairs visited, but no formal campaign materialized. The country would plod along without him for a while, but our fears were briefly allayed in the summer of 2012, when the Post noted that Pataki was back on the Iowa picnic circuit and preparing to jump into the nomination race. But no dice; he again opted to stay out, meaning that he would never join the likes of Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum in topping GOP primary polls at some point in the 2012 campaign. And the American people have once again had to struggle along without his leadership.

The 2016 field has a somewhat more serious mix of personalities, though not universally so: Trump is “seriously thinking” of running and Palin is “seriously interested” and Mike Huckabee is seriously warring with Beyonce and Ben Carson is seriously proposing that homophobic bakers might poison same-sex couples’ wedding cakes. Those clowns aside, Pataki likes to think of himself as a thinker and innovator and may find the tone in 2016 a bit more amenable to policy discussions. Now 69 years of age, Pataki needs to act soon if he wants to be able to say he once ran for president. He’s running out of time to create the Pataki Moment that our country, err, George Pataki, so desperately needs.

On Sunday, Facebook and Instagram alerted me to the two-year anniversary of the launch of Ready for Hillary – Hillary Clinton’s Super PAC for the 2016 election. It’s exciting because she’s a giant on the American political landscape, and I have found droves of people who have been inspired by her and anticipate great things from a Hillary Clinton presidency.

But since its launch, Ready for Hillary has also felt like a march toward inevitable nomination. When a leading voice of the grassroots left weighs in over a year before the first caucus and primary votes are cast – as Howard Dean did last month in Politico – there is clearly interest from unexpected places in accelerating a candidate selection process that needs some time and thought, and we need to step back and make sure we’re thinking this through. I want the right kind of Hillary Clinton candidacy. I think we can get it, but I’m not taking it for granted.

Let’s quickly dispense with the obvious: no one can question the strength of her resume: from playing an active role in White House policy in the ’90s to eight years in the Senate to four years as Secretary of State, she is incredibly versed in policy foreign and domestic and in both the legislative and executive branches of government. Preparation is not in doubt here. But Hillary Clinton still needs to make the case for why she should be the Democratic nominee for president. It has to be more than her historic significance as potentially the first woman to become a major-party presidential nominee, because there are plenty of women who would make fantastic nominees. If we’re into the idea of Hillary as trailblazer – and I am into that: I am ashamed of the lack of women in Congress, in state legislatures, in the White House, and I’ve long wondered if we need to institute gender quotas like in various countries around the world – then why not Kirsten Gillibrand, with a few hard-fought legislative victories already under her belt and major initiatives in progress despite an era of do-nothingism in Congress? She was rewarded with a state-record 72% of New York’s vote in her last race. Or Amy Klobuchar, whose comprehensive efforts on energy policy resonate in both economic and environmental terms and are decidedly 21st-century in their focus – and who in 2012 won 85 out of 87 counties in a state that we still often count as swingy? Or despite her brief time in public office, Elizabeth Warren, with a coherent message about the things that created a financial crisis and the risky steps we’re taking toward repeating them? That’s just to name Democratic candidates; the lengthy list of expected Republican candidates currently lacks any women, but that could yet change and hopefully will (he said, without holding his breath for the slightest length of time).

And if it’s a matter of checking off the philosophical boxes, well…we’re not really sure, are we? We don’t have any reason to believe Hillary would be more aggressive in prosecuting Wall Street for its ongoing offenses against the less-moneyed citizens of this country. Suspicion of Wall Street types has never been a hallmark of the Clinton family. The Iraq invasion in 2003 was a major mistake: as a rule we probably shouldn’t launch wars on false pretenses, or that curtail our military readiness to complete an existing and more pressing mission in Afghanistan, or that exhaust our country’s patience and send us spiraling toward isolationist sentiments now shared by large swaths of right and left – hence our uncertain responses to more recent conflicts in Libya and Syria. The first two were obvious at the time of her vote, and the third was frankly predictable to those of us with any awareness of our nation’s history when it comes to supporting ongoing involvement in wars. It was a three-part mistake that Hillary has never acknowledged. And did she acknowledge this mistake? The one where she seemed, intentionally or not, to imply that hard-working Americans are white Americans, and that maybe non-white Americans are not? Not a pleasant moment in her 2008 candidacy.

I readily concede that asking any major party nominee to mount a populist war on banks is unrealistic – though I’d happily take a pass on the rhetoric and settle for a quiet sequence of legal prosecutions and major reforms. The Iceland model is just fine with me, and I would welcome a Hillary Clinton candidacy that talks about these kinds of measures, as opposed to the derivative regulation rollback we just saw from our lame-duck Congress. As for foreign policy, her hawkishness has not changed since the Bush administration and I have no reason from her statements to believe it will, so I have to worry that her presidency would likewise focus on the wrong enemy at the wrong time, leaving us unable to respond nimbly to other crises.

There are positives on policy, beyond the resume: she started talking about student debt in her fall speeches. This is encouraging, because I’m of the mindset that people in their 20s and 30s are severely hamstrung by student debt, rendering many of us unable to fully participate in the economy. I’ll feel better if this becomes a key facet of her platform. The next step toward policy relevance for my crowd: start talking about the transit investments that will make more of our cities livable for those of us who wouldn’t mind commuting sans car. The better the transit in any given city, the more places we can afford to live in said city (or even outside cities). Yes, transit tends to drive up rents and property prices: but inexpensive housing is meaningless if it’s nowhere near where we want to work and play. We’re hearing any number of people talk about road and bridge improvements as necessary investments and (temporary) job creators, but transit has to be part of the mix or infrastructure benefits will miss younger people. And as is well-documented, any Democratic presidential campaign in 2016 is going to rely on younger votes, so how about the policies start to match the need? Steve Singiser is the latest to write about the first part (the politics); I’m trying to get the discussion moving on the second part (the policies).

None of the questions or criticisms above are meant to preclude my support for her candidacy! Not in a primary election, or especially in a general election where it’s easy to imagine the totality of her positions adding up to something much stronger than a Republican nominee in thrall with his (let’s face it, it’ll be his, not her) party’s various foibles like a resistance to financial regulation and infrastructure investment, an inclination toward climate denial, toward rejection of reproductive rights, toward mockery of the notion that ours is still an unequal society whether we’re talking about gender or sexual identity or race or class, toward cluelessness about net neutrality, and so forth. As a New Yorker, I’ve already voted for her twice (for U.S. Senate in 2000 and 2006). But in the meantime, I think she should earn it in the present: we need a dialogue and we need to see what kind of platform she begins laying out.

The whole “ready for” concept has always annoyed me a little bit anyway, because what I’m really ready for is to concentrate on the rest of the Obama presidency – you know, the one that Paul Krugman, writing in Rolling Stone, correctly termed one of the greatest in history. I usually don’t go in for Krugman’s more agitated writings, but he does have his strong suits, from the esoteric (such as connecting American readers to the ongoing demise of democracy in Hungary) to the commonplace (like assessing a presidency). And I think that part of having a historic presidency is defending it against a newly-empowered Congressional majority that seeks to destroy it, and that requires some vigilance. The president himself has sometimes fallen short in mounting his own defense, but last week’s State of the Union was the latest in a series of post-midterm actions and statements that recognize progress made and outline aggressive goals for building upon those successes. Oh, and it included this. You know, I had watched this a bunch of times already, and only now did I notice he winked afterward. He winked! I love it all over again.

So sure – I’m ready for Hillary, but I’m not Ready For Hillary™. I’m just as ready for Elizabeth or Kirsten or Amy. I’m probably ready for Deval or ‘Loop or Martin, too, though I think it would be hella good for this country to have a female president. And I’m quite ready for someone coming from outside the elected realm, though the Obama presidency has demonstrated that a degree of political nuance is important to the job, or at least to beltway perceptions of one’s skill set for the role. There’s plenty of time for the nomination campaign to get started, but in the meantime Democrats need to figure out how to operate in a world where Republicans hold some very important cards at the legislative table and where last month’s split budget vote indicates that we have a competition between pragmatism and populism pulling at our Congressional delegation. How that unfolds in the coming months is surely as important as how the next few steps of Hillary’s campaign-in-waiting play out.

Every now and again, the “old” John McCain comes back.

I wasn’t politically-engaged enough in 2000 to have much of a sense at the time of what his primary campaign for the Republican presidential nomination focused upon, but the first George W. Bush presidential term that followed provided occasional glimpses into what might have been. McCain’s hawkishness provided useful (or damaging, from my perspective) cover to assuage moderates that the administration’s prosecution of the war on terror was appropriate, but on domestic policy he offered support for significant and successful campaign finance reform (since eviscerated by the Supreme Court’s de facto conservative majority) as well as legislation to combat climate change. In those days, he also tended to be a reasonable voice on immigration reform, as was President Bush. McCain was a lot of Democrats’ favorite Republican: by no means right on all the issues, but good on a few of them and with enough charisma and credibility to be a useful bridge to bipartisanship from time to time.

By 2008, that was fading. Lessons having been learned from eight years before, he had to run a bit more to his right in order to secure the nomination against the challenges posed by Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. The general election campaign against Barack Obama was not stridently ideological until he made the astounding decision to place future Tea Party heroine Sarah Palin on the ticket. But his tone was decidedly changed from the earlier McCain. Vexed that his experience was being trumped by Obama’s reformist sensibilities and frankly modern message, McCain struggled to conceal his affront as the race slipped away. It took him a while to recover: Obama’s first term was marked by a snarling, partisan McCain who now struggled to find common cause across the aisle, and who focused his 2010 Senate primary campaign on immigration in the face of a challenger who attempted to out-conservative him on the issue. The “complete the dang fence” ad is not exactly the McCain-as-statesman image pushed by the mainstream media from 2000 onward.

But one common thread throughout McCain’s tenure is his opposition to torture (or its charming euphemism, “enhanced interrogation techniques”) and his willingness to note both the ineffectiveness and immorality of such approaches. Americans raised on “24” have been led to believe that bad guys will crack under pressure and tell you where the other bad guys or what they’re up to, and our American heroes then use that information to save the day. As McCain and various scientific researchers point out, the information gleaned from these techniques is often worthless: the things people say under extreme physical and psychological duress are often junk, uttered only to make the torture stop. Beyond that, one would rather have the moral high ground in fighting a war, and treating

This was something McCain had to do continually during the 2008 Republican primary debates, as he shared the stage with seven, eight, nine candidates who all proudly asserted they would continue the Bush administration’s torture regime. One of my more surreal experiences of that campaign was watching a war hero explain to a bunch of people with no military or intelligence experience that he knew a little something about this issue and could tell them how a torture victim actually responds.

Now, in the aftermath of the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the use of torture, McCain is again in the position of bucking most of his party and offering an impassioned defense of the report’s release – as well as decrying the moral and indeed strategic cost of American use of torture. These are ultra-partisan times, and I don’t want to give a senator too much credit for just doing what’s right. But there’s always room for the statesman version of John McCain to challenge past practices and hopefully ensure that America lives up to its values going forward.

p.s. – in the interest of recognizing when my local Congressman gets something right, U.S. Representative Chris Gibson offered similar thoughts to McCain on Wednesday: “I’m talking as a guy who has front line experience. You’re never going to get any reliable information through any other means than through persuasion,” said Gibson, who served in the Army for more than two decades. “If you put somebody under torture, they’re going to tell you anything you want to hear to have it stop. It’s not reliable. I’m telling you from both a values perspective and a pragmatic perspective, what you want to do with a prisoner or a detainee is to have them be in the space where they see it’s in their best interest to share information.”

In the wake of the Newtown shooting in December, my WTM collaborator Matt Clausen published this piece to reflect upon where the national discussion might go. I intended to respond promptly, but I couldn’t find my intellectual and emotional footing. More than six months later, I still don’t have a game-changing set of answers to the questions raised since then about safety and freedoms. But I have thought a lot, which is all we can do sometimes. Here’s what came from that process. 

When Matt first published his piece about gun politics, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to engage the question he was asking – can we get everyone involved in the far-reaching gun discussion to the table for a fair and open-minded examination of how to prevent gun deaths in America? And what does “gun discussion” even mean anymore? I had spent years steeped in the belief that gun ownership and the wider gun culture was an innate and valuable part of our national heritage. For all that I appreciate most iconoclastic attempts to break down the mythologies that fuel American identity, this was one that the historian in me wanted to believe was abstract but valuable: a link to a frontier that played such a role in our past, an opportunity to connect the past and present through pastimes that had an inherently rustic association. Plus, I believed, and still believe, that rural America is right to occasionally feel misunderstood by urban dwellers. I’m a very geographic person; “place” is always a very salient concept for me. I saw no reason to upset a balance on gun policy that seemed in so many ways to be defined by place and how we as Americans related to it. The national Democratic party mostly saw things the same way, leaving behind gun control as a major policy position rather than fighting elections over an issue so mystically entwined with national identity.

I thought that my position was bringing us together via a sort of detente. It was allowing us to leave behind one piece of the culture wars that so often defined modern American politics, that divided us along stark lines that obscured our overarching commonalities.

I think was wrong. It turns out that no trust had been banked during that time. Those years of apparent consensus bought absolutely nothing from gun rights advocates. Instead, long before Newtown – and with great intensity in the months after – they armed themselves to the teeth. We watched gun sales skyrocket in the months leading up to President Obama’s re-election, lest victory at the ballot box embolden him to enact the long-held gun control schemes he had so long been plotting. Newtown itself was met with absurdities from gun advocates: raving fantasies about how violence in schools would be reduced if only we armed teachers and security guards, and ultimately, the defeat of bipartisan background check legislation in the U.S. Senate.

But in the months since Newtown, we also saw an imperfect but far more helpful contribution to the discussion, and it has come from many places: gun rights advocates, mental health advocates and those concerned more generally about society’s well-being completely separate from gun violence. It’s a critical piece of the puzzle: the idea that  mental health is the root issue in these killing sprees and in plenty of other violence acts, and there’s a reasonable case to be made with respect to the post-Newtown discussion. It sets aside the one-on-one gun violence that is still pervasive in many American neighborhoods, but I’m always happy to see people discussing mental health as a real issue in any context. Yet sadly, many of these dialogues – certainly including those occurring at the Congressional level – have overwhelmingly missed the point: they focus on the need to lock people up, on “crazy people” and sentencing and institutionalization and court-ordered treatment. There’s a place for that, in many cases. But that rhetorical linkage between crime and psychological well-being does two unhelpful things: one, it stigmatizes those with mental illness, turning them – I’m sorry, us – into criminals waiting to happen, and two, it pretends that access to treatment only starts to matter as a facet of public policy when someone has gone over the edge. In reality, we need to de-stigmatize mental illness so that individuals seek treatment long before he or she is damaged enough to hurt another person.

That’s a cultural shift that we need to take, and as much progress has been made in terms of accepting the fact that a large percentage of our population struggles with mental illness, we still have a ways to go. I’d like you to to pause for a minute to think about how many people in your life you can openly discuss your emotional troubles with when they go beyond the mundane and into the clinical. Not just the lousy day you had at work, or the slippage in a romantic relationship, but the lingering sadness that comes from loss, from being unsure of your purpose or goals in life, or a lack of close friendships, or the kids you miss now that they’ve grown up and are not scurrying around your house. Maybe it’s the anxiety that leaves you on edge for days at a time, snapping at minor trivialities. Maybe it’s the panic attacks you sometimes get crossing a bridge. Or at social events. Or the ones that come for seemingly no reason at all in the middle of the night when insomnia opens the flood gates, and you sit in the anxiously in the dark, afraid, confused and worried, wondering if things will be back to “normal” by the time you have to get up and go to work in the morning. How many people do you have for whom it’s okay to talk about those things – those seemingly irrational vulnerabilities – in detail? And how often does it feel like it’s okay to burden those people with any discussion of what’s happening? They’re so sympathetic, but you just know they have other things to worry about, too…now imagine it’s worse. Imagine the scope of your troubles involves horrific swings in mood and functioning, or bends in reality that divorce you from what “everyone else” is seeing, hearing, experiencing. Imagine the isolation is deeper – you really have no one.

That brings us to the second facet of the guns-and-health discussion, which is access. Remember that in many states, it’s pretty easy to get a gun and a carry permit. Gun shows and private sales make it a veritable free-for-all. It should be as easy, or easier, to seek the mental heath treatment you need. And guess what? That might mean that government has to spend money to expand access to care – to create new, affordable clinics, or to increase staffing at existing agencies, or to improve education and awareness of what’s out there and available. It also might mean that we have to impose new regulations on the insurance industry – it was only a few years ago that my home state of New York finally passed permanent parity legislation, requiring heath plans to provide comparable coverage for mental health treatment relative to treatment for physical ailments.

In this lingering era of  Tea Party politics, it’s not too fashionable to note that sometimes we have to invest or regulate. And there’s a great deal of overlap between reactionary, Tea Party conservatives and gun rights advocates. I find that I can’t count on most gun rights advocates serving in our state and federal governments to legislate these improvements in health care services – they’re too busy they’re too busy claiming that we’re coming to take their guns, that Barack Obama or Andrew Cuomo are fascist dictators, that they need to be armed to the teeth for that hypothetical day when they need to defend their homes against tyrannical oppressors.

That’s the state of affairs as I see it on the health care side. In terms of actual gun policy, I’m content for now to keep it simple. Background checks, folks. Ensure that we know who we’re selling to – every sale. Registration, folks. Ensure that we have a last known owner in association with any firearm, so that we can get to the root of illegal transfers and appropriately punish people who sell recklessly. These don’t need to be scary initiatives. These are common sense means of continuing to permit widespread ownership while ensuring that we decrease sales to dangerous people. And we have to understand that some of the people who go on to commit violent acts obtained their firearms through perfectly legal means, and then become criminals. And that means that some states are going to attempt to reduce the total number of firearms in circulation, and to restrict sales entirely of some kinds of firearms and accessories deemed to be dangerous in the hands of the wrong person – who may well have been the “right” person when (s)he initially acquired the gun, passing background checks and so forth. Categorizing and restricting various firearms as assault weapons is a much thornier matter, from how you do it in a technical sense all the way to whether it is even effective on a state-by-state (rather than federal) level.

Both my home state of New York and neighboring Connecticut passed comprehensive and bipartisan gun legislation in the aftermath of the events at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I think that Connecticut basically got their new law right, both in terms of what it actually does and the painstaking time taken to craft it. Inclusiveness and openness were the hallmarks of their process. If I were sitting in their state legislature, I would have voted for it. New York’s law, passed months before Connecticut, includes a few more bizarre features than our neighbors to the east, and was passed through an absurd process: in the middle of the night, with a message of necessity from the governor to waive the three-day waiting period before voting. Look, under those circumstances, I would have voted against it. Process matters. But let’s look at the fallout in New York, because as I said at the start of this piece, I think I was wrong about where the nation was in terms of trusting each other to be respectful in the gun debate.

As a staffer in the state legislature, passage of a gun control bill meant that I would not just experience the ensuing discussion up close, I would be part of the dialogue. And that discussion was one of the most frustrating that I have experienced. Given my reservations about the law and the way it was passed, I had as open a mind as one could hope for. I watched as people who knew better offered comments like “I became a felon overnight.” Well, no, you didn’t, for a few reasons – the simplest of which is that if you had a firearm that fell under the expanded assault weapons ban, you had until 2014 to register it.

“But registration leads to confiscation!” Oh? By whom? When is this confiscation taking place? And why? What is the government’s motivation? To gain greater control over society? To do what? I have had that conversation with dozens of NYS residents in the last six months. It always peters out when I try to get the other person to explain what the end-game is: Ok, Obama and Cuomo want to take all your guns…and then do what? What’s the big plan at the end of all of this? Conspiracy theories aren’t much fun if you don’t provide us with some hint as to the dramatic climax your antagonists are conspiring toward.

“High-capacity magazines can’t be restricted – they’re fun, plus if I’m repelling a home invasion, I need all the shots I can get!” Come on, guys. When your argument is that you’re not very good at hitting your target, you shouldn’t be angry at legislators. You should find something to play with besides guns. Or become a better shot.

***

We need to get better at dialogue in this country. Matt’s original post was skeptical that we were ready to do that, and he was all too correct, at least with respect to our national lawmaking body. The results in our state legislatures are more mixed – to stick with the local examples, New York and Connecticut passed laws, but only the latter engaged in a dialogue along the way. With respect to the people themselves, there is overwhelming consensus in support the gun control measures Washington actually did try to pass – but as we all know too well from watching it dabble in twenty-week abortion bans and sloppy farm bills in the months since the background checks vote, Congress is not a representative body in any actual sense.

We need to get better at trusting each other. Those living in more rural areas need to stop assuming that city folk don’t understand them and are out to change their way of life, and people in cities can’t assume that rural people are remnants of a different civilization. We also need to get better at dealing with realities as they exist on the ground: No one’s confiscating guns. No one’s discarding the Constitution (but try reading ALL of District of Columbia v. Heller – not just the parts gun advocates love – so that you can better understand the leeway granted states in regulating firearms). And there are lots of people who don’t know the first place to start when they feel their emotional grip becoming tenuous, so we can’t pretend that we’ve done enough to make those services available.

When we start to do those things, we might begin to tear down the ideological and political barriers to passing benign legislation like Manchin/Toomey. We might begin to operate in good faith, so that we get outcomes like Connecticut’s gun bill rather than New York’s. And we might start to repair the broken democratic process that allows people to kill background check legislation in the first place. Newtown is about the death of wonderful people, including many who, bless their tiny hearts, lived too short a time to ever lose their precious innocence. It should also be about a nation turning a corner in its approach to politics and governance.

In our third show, we look back at the SC-1 special election and ahead to the Massachusetts senate special. Then we dive into the “how” of being campaign and election junkies – our history in campaigns, favorite resources, jargon and so on. We hope you enjoy.

Episode 3: