“I don’t see the “flip-flop” on gun control.”
Apparently neither did the cheering crowd at the NRA.
I think to some people here a political view is not acceptable unless it’s adhered to since birth. By that standard, it would be pretty darn hard for anyone to convert to Christianity (just to take one example) since such conversions could be seen as “flip-flopping”.
Some people here won’t accept agreement from others unless the others have met some historical prerequisites.
That not only sucks for the Republican Party, but it sucks for conservativism, too.
You can’t be a conservative because you weren’t a conservative before.
What a great standard to hold people to.
Ronald Reagan lobbied members of the House of Representatives to support the 1994 federal Assault Weapons Ban. The ban passed by only two votes; at least two House members publicly credited Reagan’s direct appeals for their “aye” votes.
In the early 1990s, President Reagan lobbied Congress to pass the Brady Law, a major gun safety initiative vigorously opposed by the gun lobby.
During Reagan’s tenure as President, bans on cop-killer bullets, undetectable handguns, and the manufacture and sale of machine guns became law.
Reagan would have been absolutely vilified by some here. Indeed, Reagan said it best when he said:
“When I began entering into the give and take of legislative bargaining in Sacramento, a lot of the most radical conservatives who had supported me during the election didn’t like it. “Compromise” was a dirty word to them and they wouldn’t face the fact that we couldn’t get all of what we wanted today. They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. If you don’t get it all, some said, don’t take anything. I’d learned while negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933: ‘I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average.’ If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later, and that’s what I told these radical conservatives who never got used to it.” Ronald Reagan, in his autobiography, An American Life