Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 13, 1991 TAG: 9102130505
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: THOMAS BOYER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Incumbents in marginal districts fear a mistake that could cost them their seats in November. Others worry about falling awry of party leaders and having their districts butchered in redistricting.
Democrats, for the first time ever, are afraid of losing control of the House of Delegates. Republicans fear not doing as well as expected in Virginia's burgeoning suburbs.
So it's entirely appropriate that the National Rifle Association scored the lobbying coup of the year last week, when the House of Delegates killed a plan to ask voters whether they wanted a three-day waiting period for handgun purchases.
Other interest groups give out campaign money and shrimp and seats on boards of directors. The NRA dispenses fear. Actually, to be more precise, the NRA sprinkles fear, sort of in the way a B-52 sprinkles 2,000-pound bombs.
If you represent a Southside town like Appomattox or Danville, and the NRA gets worried that, say, you're about to vote to outlaw Teflon-coated bullets, they don't send a nice guy in a gray suit to see you, as the banks would.
They spit out a few hundred mailgrams from their headquarters in Washington to NRA members in your district, telling them that you are betraying them, that you are taking away their constitutional rights, that you are voting with the liberals from up north. And soon your phone starts to ring.
They do the same thing in the 'burbs, where they also have lots of members. But if you represent a place like Virginia Beach or Fairfax County, where probably four out of five voters support at least some gun control, you can look at this problem through the other end of the kaleidoscope. In fact, you can make the NRA your friend at election time by making it your enemy.
State Sen. Moody E. Stallings Jr., D-Virginia Beach, has pursued this strategy with gusto, promoting all sorts of gun-regulation measures that, leaving aside policy questions, You can make the NRA your friend at election time by making it your enemy. make him one of the NRA's biggest targets.
Stallings will try to make the fear run the other direction. Come November, he'll use the NRA to push his supporters to the polls. The appeal will go out something like: Please, I need your help to rescue me from those wide-eyed, gun-loving fanatics from Washington.
Stallings believes he can get away with this because he's a duck hunter with a Purple Heart from Vietnam. But for Democrats, the principle should apply throughout the suburbs: You're a lot better off running against the NRA than against the party of Reagan and Bush.
It just so happens that the Democrats are very worried about the suburbs. In Northern Virginia, around Richmond, and in Hampton Roads, the 'burbs will get more seats in the legislature in this year's redistricting. And those new districts, full of Reagan-Bush voters, are going to belong to the GOP unless the Democrats find some issues to yank them away.
So last fall, Democratic strategists hatched a plan. One part is to force a vote on an abortion-rights resolution, so they can use abortion the way Gov. L. Douglas Wilder and Lt. Gov. Donald S. Beyer Jr. did in the 1989 statewide campaign.
Another part is to back a proposal for a statewide referendum on a three-day waiting period for handgun purchases. It is tantamount to putting the NRA on the ballot.
The bill, sponsored by Del. Jean W. Cunningham of Richmond, got 31 Democratic co-sponsors. At a heated Democratic caucus last month, 48 of the 59 House Democrats reportedly agreed to support the bill.
Then the NRA and its intense chief lobbyist, Charles H. Cunningham, and its mailgram machine went to work. Radio ads were run on rural stations claiming Cunningham's bill was a plot hatched by Northern Virginians that all "real Virginians" would oppose.
The mailgrams charged the Democrats with a "secret" plot to "harrass" law-abiding gun-owners. Phones in legislators' offices started to ring, and ring, and ring. Full-page newspaper ads buttressed the argument.
The NRA promoted another bill that would expand the state's system of instant criminal record checks for gun purchases, arguing that it eliminated the need for any waiting period. Voting for it would allow those opposing the waiting period to claim they had done something to regulate guns.
For the short term, the NRA's lobbying worked beautifully: Cunningham's bill was defeated 55-42. The Democrats saw a third of their members bolt from the caucus position, including probably 10 who had said they would vote for it.
But the whole episode raises some worrisome questions about the future of the NRA:
Why is the group so afraid of a referendum? Isn't that an acknowledgement that it's a loser in the court of public opinion?
Why do so many of the best minds in the Democratic Party think they can win elections by confronting the NRA?
What happens in the future if legislators who voted for the referendum conclude in November that it helped them? Or that folks who voted the NRA line conclude that it hurt them? Or that it didn't make a whit of difference?
If enough lawmakers decide they don't have to fear the NRA, the group's power will dissolve fast, because there are only a handful of legislators who have ever voted the NRA position out of love.
by CNB