Fast and Furious, Beyond Gun Control: Obama Wants to Erase His First (and Only) Political Defeat
The root of Operation Fast and Furious is gun control. And the root of Barack Obama’s obsession with gun control is not typical left-wing politics, but the burning memory of the only political defeat in his career: his failed primary challenge against incumbent Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) in 2000, when Obama’s hypocrisy on gun control legislation earned him the outrage and ridicule of the Chicago media, and sealed his electoral defeat.
Then-state senator Obama had backed a bipartisan bill called the Safe Neighborhoods Act. It would have raised the crime of illegal transport of a firearm from a misdemeanor to a felony. But on the crucial day of the vote, Obama was out of town–and on vacation, in Hawaii. The bill failed by only three votes, and the media pounced–as did Obama’s rivals. It was the moment, Obama later said, when he knew he would lose the race.
Obama, not used to losing, was hurt badly by the experience, as he wrote in his second biography, The Audacity of Hope: “[I]t’s impossible not to feel at some level as if you have been personally repudiated by the entire community, that you don’t quite have what it takes, and that everywhere you go the word ‘loser’ is flashing through people’s minds. The scars had “sufficiently” healed, Obama wrote, only eighteen months later.
Those scars never fully healed–Obama was still smarting from the loss years later, after he had won election to the U.S. Senate. It had not just been a political loss, but a personal one: as Ed Klein notes in The Amateur, it was the 2000 defeat that brought Michelle Obama to the point of considering divorce. (Obama himself wrote in Audacity that she had stopped speaking to him at the time of his ill-timed Hawaii vacation.)
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com
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