Courting the NRA
-
- September
- 21
Twelve years ago, Rudy Giuliani described the NRA as extremist.
“The NRA, for some reason, I think goes way overboard,” he said in an interview with Charlie Rose on PBS. “It’s almost what the extremists on the other side do. I think the extremists of the left and the extremists of the right have essentially the same tactic  the slippery slope theory. ‘If you give one point, then your entire argument is going to fall apart,’ and we kind of get destroyed by that.”
Not what he wants to be reminded of today.
And so when rival John McCain spoke to NRA today in Washington, D.C., he had this to say.
“My friends, gun owners are not extremists, you are the core of modern America.”
He went on to castigate politicians who use crime in big cities to justify gun control and denounce a lawsuit that Giuliani and other mayors brought against the gun industry.
“A number of big-city mayors decided it was more important to blame the manufacturers of a legal product than it was to control crime in their own cities,” McCain said.
Bad luck for Giuliani that a federal court in New York is hearing arguments in that lawsuit today.
Giuliani of course supported gun control as mayor. He now says gun laws are best left to local governments.
This entry was posted
on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 12:10 pm by Noreen O'Donnell.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Print This Post
| 
Email This Post
Giuliani is doing what the public forces all politicians to do—adjust their views to their audience.
In his run for the Republican nomination, he is surely courting a very different constituency than he did in running for New York City mayor. New York City voters have little in common with Republican primary voters.
It remains to be seen if he can bridge that chasm.