Essential logic

LITTLE ROCK — Bill Clinton was talking about y’all Saturday to President Barack Obama’s big financial backers.

He was brought in to perform some of that old analytical magic for Obama’s National Finance Council. The well-wired Politico, at politico. com, got somebody to give a transferable ticket to one of its reporters.

So there we all were-inside the room as the maestro held forth candidly for the big Democratic moneybags.

Politico reported that Clinton talked about guns and Arkansawyers, which is redundant.

This was a little like that time Obama got caught talking to donors in California. The then-candidate offered crude speculation about how folks in Pennsylvania and West Virginia didn’t like him because they were scared economically and therefore were clinging to their guns and their religion.

People who are scared and clinging to their guns and religion don’t like finding out that a guy running for president talks about them like that. They think it trivializes their faith and firearms, and thus them.

And it does, of course.

So, as Politico reported it, Clinton was telling these big-bucks Democrats on Saturday that the Democrats have a lot going for them right now.

Republicans have won the popular vote in a presidential election only once in 20 years, he noted. But he explained that midterm elections, when the full electorate stays home and more passionate conservatives turn out, can keep Democrats from locking down a permanent majority.

In that context, Clinton said, Democrats will err if they are insensitive to the gun culture and blithely embrace polls showing most Americans to be with them on some measure of gun restriction.

It’s not about superficial polling of general attitudes, he said. Intense passions matter more, he said. And a lot of people in certain areas are single issue voters over guns, he said.

Al Gore lost the presidency, Clinton said, because he lost Colorado, where he endorsed a gun-show regulatory ballot issue that the people of Colorado favored.

But, Clinton explained, 30 percent of the Colorado voters were motivated solely by that issue-by opposing it-and Gore ceded all of them. And that, when added to whatever else was in play in the race, was just enough to cost him the state and the White House.

Then Your Boy Bill got started talking about Arkansas.

“Do not patronize the passionate supporters of your opponents by looking down your nose at them,” Clinton said.

“A lot of these people live in a world very different from the world lived in by the people proposing these things. I know because I come from this world.

“A lot of these people . . . all they’ve got is their hunting and their fishing. Or they’re living in a place where they don’t have much police presence. Or they’ve been listening to this stuff for so long that they believe it all.”

Patronizing? Yeah.

Insulting? A little.

True? Pretty much.

By “stuff,” I would presume, Clinton meant the seemingly irrepressible nonsense that holds that liberals want to disarm everybody and take away God-fearing people’s freedom to defend themselves and shoot for sport.

All in the world Obama wants to do is restrict civilian use of military-style weapons. And he wants to keep closer regulatory tabs, not on guns of recreation or self-defense, but on people whose diagnosed conditions or behavioral patterns ought to keep them from owning firearms.

Free press doesn’t mean I can’t be sued for libel, just as the right to bear arms doesn’t mean you can keep your own nuclear weapon in your closet.

There are certain matters of logic that must transcend zealous absolutism. On anything, not just guns.

Republicans feed and cynically exploit the raging illogic, essentially saying: Vote for us and we’ll let you keep your shoulder-held surface-to air missile so that you can exercise your God-given constitutional right to shoot down passing aircraft.

Here’s what the Democratic message needs to be, if I might venture to extrapolate from Clinton’s famous insight:

We will fight to the death to protect your precious constitutional right to shoot and kill a deer or a duck or a pheasant or a turkey or human intruder at your home in protection of yourself and your family.

But we also will fight to the death to try to keep a monster in Connecticut or anywhere else from gunning down 20 first-graders before police can respond and leaving as many as 11 bullet holes in some of these precious, innocent babies entrusted to our failed public care so that they might get an education.

Shoot all the game and bad guys you want, but help us try to save the little children from monstrous men with monstrous toys . . . Might not that have some appeal even in, say, Arkansas?

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.