-By Warner Todd Huston
Vice President Joe Biden is again plying the phones calling his former colleagues on Capitol Hill bending ears over the President’s gun control ideas. His calls are coming on a “near-daily basis” as Obama mounts another push for gun control.
Biden has held private meetings with Republican Senators such as John McCain (Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and, Johnny Isakson (Ga.), and will be haunting the offices of Capitol Hill in the days ahead.
It appears that President Obama is relying on Biden to leverage the relationships he had built when he was a long-serving Senator from Delaware to cajole Congress into acquiescing to new gun control laws.
“President Obama is the strategist and Vice President Biden is the tactician,” Democratic consultant Chris Kofinis told The Hill. “I think the president is laying out the frame, the message, the vision about where we need to go and why. The vice president understands how to make that happen. You have two interlocking pieces that work very well together.”
Republicans, however, scoff at the idea that Biden is an effective negotiator.
“So far, his work has been to rally allies and berate opponents. In that role, he’s very effective but, as for reaching out to the other side, he’s impotent. He’s breaking no new ground, and that’s probably by design,” said GOP strategist Ken Lundberg.
Biden has also forged ahead with gun control ideas quite heedless of the delicate political balance over the issue. Last week, Biden boldly claimed that the current proposals are “only the beginning” of the President’s gun-banning proposals.
During a conference call with thousands of anti-Second Amendment activists, Biden assured them that the current plans will soon be expanded. “That doesn’t mean this is the end of the process. This is the beginning of the process,” Biden said.
The Vice President went on to berate politicians that didn’t have the “courage” to immediately pass massive new gun control measures in the wake of the crime at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut late last year.
Despite all his activity pushing new gun control policies, though, even Biden had to admit that these new curbs won’t end mass killings.
In a meeting with reporters on February 1, the Vice President said that new gun banning measures won’t ensure an end to mass killings but, he claimed, the measures might “save some lives.”
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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