Balance of Power

    Once more, Kilcannon gave Hampton a thin smile. 'Go on.'

    The President's calm, Hampton realized, unnerved him. 'To survive,' he continued flatly, 'our people will have to abandon you. Being true to yourself may be the Kilcannon persona. But in Montana, being true to you is suicide. Remember the bumper stickers on all those pickup trucks, 'If Kilcannon wins, you lose'?

    'You lost, Mr. President.' Leaning forward, Hampton mustered all the conviction he possessed. 'In the senate, we've got forty-six votes out of a hundred. I can't get forty for any gun law you could sign without gagging. That's the fact.'

    Gazing at Hampton across the table, the President rested his chin against the curled fingers of one hand. 'What else should I consider?'

    'You know all this, Mr. President.' Hampton stopped abruptly, stifling his aggravation, the strong sense that Kilcannon was toying with him. 'There's also the union vote. At least forty percent of the rank and file has some sympathy for the SSA. In Michigan, they shut down auto plants on the first day of deer season.

    'The AFL-CIO is not willing to sacrifice jobs or health care or better public schools to gun control. Their president told me just yesterday, 'more people get killed in car wrecks than with guns.' '

    'Sweeney,' Kerry said coldly, 'can say a lot of things. But the AFLCIO needs me to succeed. Without me, they're screwed.'

    Hampton sat back. In the rawest sense of power politics, this was true—the union leadership had nowhere else to go, and so must fight to save the president they had. 'So let's talk about the SSA,' Kilcannon continued calmly. 'They're like the Wizard of Oz—as scary as you imagine them to be. After every election, they go around claiming victory— listen to them, and you'd think their candidates never lost a race. But last year they lost five of seven Senate seats they targeted. Then they proceeded to brag about their power, and lie about their losses.

    'You keep mentioning the states I lost. How is it, I sometimes wonder, that I'm sitting here.' Kilcannon's voice became sardonic. 'Perhaps because of California and New Jersey, which I won partly because of gun control.

    'Look at the map. This rural culture you keep worrying about is fading away, replaced by suburbanites who worry less about hunting season than keeping their local incarnation of Bowden away from school yards.' Kilcannon's voice softened. 'The SSA feeds on our own cowardice. Every day they hope we won't notice that they're more scared than we are. And have more to be scared about.'

    Hampton shook his head. 'Fear works for them just fine, Mr. President. That's what they use you for—to scare their members into giving them votes and money so that they can keep their guns . . .'

    'I've heard them,' Kilcannon interjected with an ironic smile. 'They're like tent show evangelists—'send us money, or Kerry Kilcannon will get you before the Devil does.' 'Confiscation was the first step to the Holocaust.' 'Without our guns, Kilcannon will set loose gays and blacks and lesbians, unleashing a new epidemic of AIDS and destroying the white male–dominated family which has made this country strong.' 'Once Kilcannon takes your gun, Al Qaeda terrorists will make house calls door-to-door.' ' Pausing, Kilcannon added dryly, 'After that, I'm planning to unleash the Internal Revenue Service.'

    Reluctantly, Hampton smiled. 'My personal favorite,' Kilcannon told him, 'was the family of five slaughtered by a madman with a pitchfork because they'd locked away their guns. Too bad it's a total fabrication.

    'There will always be a lunatic fringe, Chuck. But these people don't speak for most gun owners. Right now, no one does.' Kilcannon leaned forward. 'I'm not getting into a catfight with the SSA—that would make them too important. I intend to talk right past them, and let them get hysterical on their own.'

    'That won't be easy.' Pausing, Hampton folded his hands. 'I'm a duck hunter, Mr. President. But I can't bring that up at a dinner party in this town without some desiccated society woman thinking I'm a murderer.

    'I was raised on a farm. When I was seven, my dad gave me a twenty-two and taught me to use it safely. I went to college on a sharpshooting scholarship, and I still collect guns. I've even got a shooting range behind my farmhouse.

    'Vermont's full of people like me. We enjoy guns, period. I'm trying to make the Democratic Party a safe place for these folks. But every time you say 'gun control' what they hear is a city boy who views them with disdain.' Hampton spoke more quietly. 'Bowden should never have had a gun. As far as I'm concerned, the SSA has blood on their hands, including the First Lady's family's. But most gun owners out there believe that the SSA at least respects them, and that you don't.

    'You could get us beaten. You could even lose the Presidency. Instead we'll have some blow-dried reactionary like Fasano who shafts minorities, women and the poor, doesn't give a damn about health care, and thinks the Second Amendment protects lunatics with rocket launchers.'

    Kilcannon's smile was faint. 'Believe it or not,' he answered, 'I've

thought a lot about white males, and all the states I lost. And about why I'm sitting here instead of the guy who won them.

    'I know guns are symbolic. I still remember campaigning with a Southern congressman, counting the bullet holes in stop signs. A lot of them were his own, from when he was a kid.' Abruptly, Kilcannon stood, hands braced against the back of his chair. 'I can also read a map. The Republicans own gun territory, we own gun control territory. Because politics has turned into a culture war.

    'Forty years later we're still fighting over the 1960s. If you believe that civil rights, the women's movement and protecting the environment were basically good things, then you're likely to be a Democrat. But if you think the sixties were the time when minorities got out of hand, women abandoned their duties, promiscuity ran rampant, movies became violent and rock lyrics obscene, and the only acceptable form of discrimination became shafting white males—in short, if you still feel threatened by the changes in our society, there's precious little chance you'll hear what I have to say. Even though I tend to agree about popular entertainment.

    'That divide is strengthened by religion. I attend Mass every Sunday. But in the last election regular churchgoers voted against me three to two. The same proportion who voted for me if they didn't go to church.

    'So where do guns fit in?' Kilcannon asked rhetorically. 'For people who feel threatened they're emblematic —'you've taken everything else away from me, but you can't take my gun.' Not my natural constituency.'

    'Nor,' Hampton added, 'representative of all white males.'

    'Precisely. But Fasano and his pals have conditioned a lot of them to vote for buzzwords—'prayer in school'; 'family values'—instead of programs. It's like all these white guys trapped in some right-wing lab experiment.

    'What am I going to tell them in order to compete—that the Second Amendment embodies their most sacred right? I can't.' Pausing, Kilcannon softened his voice. 'The trick isn't to compete. The trick is to remind them that we protect their unions, their medical care and their retirement. And that the Frank Fasanos of the world will screw them in favor of their country club friends who bleat if they can't get a tax cut and a bigger second home.

    'I can speak that language. But we can't obsess on white guys. Do their votes count more than the votes of women, or blacks, or Hispan ics, or people who live in cities? Not unless we deny those voters a reason to come out for us. And that's what happens when Democrats are as gutless and whiny as we've become.

    'We need to start chipping away women and Republican moderates who think their party has been hijacked by gun nuts, antiabortion extremists, and televangelists who believe that women's suffrage was our second bite of Eve's all-too-wormy apple. So for every Democratic senator worried about losing, there's a Republican like Chad Palmer who worries about where their party's going. If we create enough pressure, Fasano won't be able to hold them.' Kilcannon's eyes bore into Hampton's. 'Lara and I are going to make Fasano pay the price for kowtowing to the SSA. And it will be huge—if not next year, then soon enough.