President Bush, before he was elected in 2000, said he would sign the renewal of the bill( which was already in place) ONLY if nothing was added to it.
The NRA endorsed Bush in 2000 and 2004.
President Bush then worked with the NRA, John Ashcroft, and Bill Frist to make sure it would die in the Senate and expire.
(President Bush got Frist allow the RATS to run wild adding so much crap that it died)
President Bush played the RATS like a banjo on that one.
The NRA wrote a great article that explained it all.
That’s the kind of compromise thinking that we usually engage in, except for when we want to play “gotcha” politics.
Romney signed an AWB that was endorsed by the NRA, and explained that he managed to get a bill that was much more in tune with what they wanted than they expected to get from the democrats.
The fact is that Bush PROMISED to approve AN EXTENSION of the existing AWB, just as Romney approved an extension of the AWB in Mass. Unfortunately, while in a generally pro-gun UNITED STATES, it was pretty easy to kill the AWB, it was impossible to do so in a liberal state like Massachusetts.
If it wasn’t for an election, we’d discuss issues rationally, weigh the pros and cons of legislative approaches, make the compromises to win the best we could win, and move on.
In the election season though, nobody really cares about issues, they just want to smear other candidates in the hopes that their candidate will somehow win by default. Ronald Reagan knew better, and he pulled the coalition together, by providing a positive message that resonated, rather than a message of negativity which said little more than “vote for me, because everybody else sucks so bad”.