Bernd Debusmann

“Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich. So if I need $600 million, I can put $600 million in myself. That’s a huge advantage … over the other candidates.”

So says real estate magnate and reality TV show host Donald Trump, talking about the 2012 U.S. presidential elections.

It’s 18 months to go to November 6, 2012, an eternity in politics, but two things already seem clear: it will be the most expensive campaign ever and the line between the political fringe and mainstream politics will often be blurred.

First, the numbers. The opening of President Barack Obama’s election campaign on April 4 prompted a slew of predictions that he would manage to raise $1 billion, comfortably in excess of the $780 million his supporters provided in 2008. That was a record, more than twice as much as his rival, Republican John McCain (and almost exactly twice as much as George W. Bush in 2004).

None of the potential Republican candidates has yet declared he (or she) is in the running. None can boast to match the “beauty” of Trump, who ranks 488 on Forbes magazine’s 2010 list of the world’s billionaires with an estimated net worth of $2 billion. If he did run, he could afford the $600 million he is talking about. In a series of television interviews, Trump has said he would make a decision in June.

Whether he runs or not, the total candidates will spend for 2012 is almost certain to top the $1.6 billion raised for the 2008 elections. One might expect that sums of that magnitude would prompt grumbles from an electorate grappling with unemployment and foreclosures but the subject of campaign finance reform has rarely stirred widespread interest.

That can’t be said of statements Trump has been making over the past three weeks, when he became the most prominent American to give credence to the views held by the diverse community known as “birthers”.

They are Americans who insist — in the face of much evidence to the contrary — that Obama was born in Kenya, his father’s native country, not the United States, and therefore his presidency is illegitimate.

The logic that underpins this belief implies an intricate intercontinental conspiracy in 1961 to get a Hawaii hospital to certify a birth and two newspapers to publish notices of birth.

“If he wasn’t born in this country, which is a real possibility, then he has pulled one of the greatest ever con tricks,” Trump said on April 10.

He went on to assure television viewers that “this country is going to hell,” the world was laughing at the United States, and the country was no longer respected. Not to worry, though. If he were elected, “I would run a great, great country … They (the world) won’t be laughing if I’m president.”

Among the reasons: “I happen to be smart, I happen to have a lot of common sense, I happen to know what I’m doing.”

LUNATIC FRINGE OR MAINSTREAM?
Liberal pundits have sprinkled their commentaries on Trump’s advocacy of the birthers with the words “fringe” or “lunatic fringe.” But judging from recent polls, among Republicans these views are not fringe — they are mainstream. A survey conducted by Public Policy Polling in February showed that 51 percent of Republican voters do not believe Obama was born in the United States. Another poll showed birther support at 42 percent.

This presents Republican leaders in Congress with something of a dilemma. Since many of the party faithful have doubts over Obama’s place of birth, Republican heavyweights have treated the issue with great caution, more so since a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in the first week of April showed Trump tied in second place among potential contenders for the party’s nomination for 2012.

That poll, taken after Trump publicly embraced the birther theory, came as a surprise. Polling experts ascribed his good showing partly to high name recognition. His lavish lifestyle, marriages and divorces, and his changing business fortunes (up-down, down-up) have been tabloid fodder for decades. His show “Celebrity Apprentice” is one of the most widely watched on U.S. television.

Its ratings have gone up since Trump started talking about the president’s birth certificate — one reason why cynics believe that his public pondering of a presidential run is a publicity ploy rather than a desire to restore the world’s remaining superpower to the greatness he says it lost.

If the aim is to profit from publicity, Trump is doing well. According to Nielsen Research Data, the season premiere of his show, in March, drew 7.9 million viewers. That ticked up each time he publicly raised his possible candidature and his doubts over Obama. Last week, viewership stood at 8.64 million. That’s up 9.3 percent from the debut.

Not bad for a possible presidential candidate. Or an accomplished showman.
(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

There is fresh thinking, of a peculiar sort, in the perennial debate over gun violence in the United States, world leader in civilian ownership of firearms. Censorship of news reporting on the mass shootings that have long been part of American life will help prevent other mass shootings.

So says the National Rifle Association (NRA) in an open letter responding to President Barack Obama’s suggestion that it is time for all sides in the gun debate to get together and find a “sensible, intelligent way” to make the United States a safer place. The president mentioned common sense and a White House spokesman talked of the need to find common ground.

Common sense has not been in abundant supply in decades of on-again, off-again debate on guns and violence. As to finding common ground between the leading gun lobby and advocates of better controls, the NRA’s Executive Vice President, Wayne LaPierre, says his group will “absolutely not” take part in the sort of meeting envisaged by Obama. Such a meeting, he said in a series of media interviews, would be with people opposed to the constitutional right to bear arms.

Talking to people of different views is obviously not a concept the politically powerful gun lobby intends to embrace.

In his open letter, LaPierre listed steps the president could take to prevent mass shootings, such as the January 8 rampage in Tucson that killed six people and wounded a member of Congress, Gabrielle Giffords. “One of these (steps) is to call on the national news media to refrain from giving deranged criminals minute-by-minute coverage of their heinous acts, which only serves to encourage copycat behavior.”

It’s an argument that presupposes that there are plenty of deranged Americans who, like the Tucson shooter, are well-armed, passed the background check required to purchase guns, and are primed to spring into action after they see scenes of carnage on television. It’s also an argument fit for a pre-Internet dictatorship where presidents could tell the media how and what to report.

Until he tip-toed into the subject of gun violence on March 13, with an op-ed article in the Arizona Daily Star, Obama had kept silent on the issue, disappointing many of those who had voted him into office after a campaign in which he promised various gun control measures, including a permanent ban on the sale of assault weapons. The disappointment ran so deep that one of the most prominent gun control groups, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, gave him an “F”, a failing grade,  after his first year in office.

The president’s belated entry into the discussion, stirred anew after the Tucson shooting, will not earn him a reputation as an audacious reformer of a system even some gun enthusiasts admit is defective. “No guts on gun reform,” noted a headline over an opinion piece critical of Obama in The Washington Post.

OBAMA MUM ON KEY ISSUES

The president made no mention of assault rifles, no mention of the high-capacity magazines control advocates want banned, no mention of private sales of guns that do not require background checks, no mention of the so-called Tiahrt Amendment which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important information to trace guns, no mention of a proposal that would have required around 8,500 gun shops along the border with Mexico to report multiple sales of two or more assault weapons to the same person.

Thousands of weapons from those gun shops end up in Mexico, where more than 36,000 people have died since 2006 in parallel wars drug traffickers wage against each other – for access to the rich U.S. market – and against the government. President Felipe Calderon has repeatedly called for a re-instatement of the ban on assault weapons the administration of George W. Bush allowed to lapse in 2004.

The Mexican government expressed disappointment when the limited measure – it called for reporting, not prohibiting, bulk sales – died in the House of Representatives in February after energetic lobbying by the NRA. For it, and other gun rights group, tighter regulations are part of a long-standing conspiracy to undo the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

Passed in 1789, the amendment says that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The sinister forces working for infringement, in the eyes of many gun owners, include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the coalition he set up in 2006, Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

It has grown from 15 mayors then to 550 now, advocates “common sense legislation for background checks”, and in January dispatched on a tour of 25 U.S. states a truck carrying a billboard with a running tally of Americans killed by guns since the Tucson mass shooting. When the truck left New York, on February 16, that count stood at 1,300. By March 17, it had risen to 2,316. Daily average: 34.

Such figures do not impress the self-appointed guardians of the Second Amendment. Neither does a bigger number: since the September 11, 2001, attack on New York and Washington, more than a quarter million Americans have died by firearms  (murder, suicide, accidents).

In online discussions about guns, without fail someone comes up with the observation that more people die in car accidents than by bullet. So, goes the inevitable question, should there be restrictions on car sales?

Another American mass shooting. Another rush to buy more guns.

On the Monday after the latest of the bloody rampages that are part of American life, gun sales in Arizona shot up by more than 60 percent and rose by an average of five percent across the entire country. The figures come from the FBI and speak volumes about a gun culture that has long baffled much of the world.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation compared January 10, 2011, with the corresponding Monday a year ago.

So what would prompt Americans to stock up their arsenals in the wake of the shooting in Tucson that killed six people and wounded 14, including Gabrielle Giffords, the congresswoman who was the target of an unhinged 22-year-old who has since been charged with attempted assassination?

To hear gun dealers tell it, demand went up because of fears that the Tucson shooting might lead to tighter gun laws. There was a similar spike in sales after the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech, where a deranged student killed 32 people and himself in the worst such massacre in American history.

Fear of regulation also drove up gun sales after President Barack Obama won the presidency in November 2008. In the first two months of 2009, about 2.5 million Americans bought guns, a 26 percent increase over the same period in 2008.

According to a CBS poll taken two days after Jared Loughner shot congresswoman Giffords in the head, Americans are almost evenly divided on the issue of gun control – 48 percent said gun laws should remain as they are or be made less strict, 47 in favor of more regulation. That is down from 56 percent in 2002 and confirms a Gallup analysis this week that found public support for stricter gun laws has declined over the past two decades.

That prompts one to wonder how many Americans see gun violence as the inevitable by-product of a free society – and whether the gun lobby has been right all along in saying that gun control advocates are out of touch with much of the country.

As one of the staunchest opponents of more gun regulation, John Lott, puts it in a book entitled More Guns, Less Crime: “American culture is a gun culture – not merely in the sense that in 2009 about 124 million people lived in households that owned a total of about 270 million guns but in a broader sense that guns pervade our debates on crime and are constantly present in movies and the news. So, we are obsessed with guns…”

WORLD LEADER IN PRIVATE GUNS
That obsession has long secured the United States the number one position on the list of gun-owning nations. There are more guns in private hands than anywhere else on earth. On a guns-per-capita basis (90 guns per 100 residents) it is comfortably ahead of second-ranked Yemen (61 per 100), according to the authoritative Small Arms Survey issued by the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

That obsession, in the eyes of gun control advocates, borders on insanity and some of the wrinkles of America’s permissive gun laws are so bizarre they beggar belief. To wit: “Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law.” Neither does inclusion on the government’s ever-growing terrorist watch list.

So found the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the research arm of Congress, after looking into the background checks of prospective buyers gun dealers are required to file to the FBI. According to a GAO report read at a congressional hearing last May, sales of guns and explosives to people on terrorist watch lists totaled 1,119 in a period of six years.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, came out in opposition to proposed legislation that would have barred people on the list from buying guns. Why? They are placed there on “reasonable suspicion” of terrorist links and the NRA argues that suspicion is not enough for Congress to take away the constitutional right, enshrined in the second amendment to the U.S. constitution, to own and bear arms.

After the Tucson attack hurt one of their own, members of Congress are worried about their safety but whether that will translate into greater willingness to tighten gun regulations remains to be seen. The test will come when a New York Democrat, Carolyn McCarthy, introduces a bill to ban extended magazines, such as the 33-round clip used by Loughner.

Such magazines were illegal from 1994 to 2004 as part of a ban on assault weapons the Bush administration let lapse, a move that prompted gun control advocates to predict a sharp increase in the number of gun deaths. That did not happen. The rate of gun deaths – by murder, suicide or accidents – has held steady at around 31,000 a year and the murder rate has actually dropped.

Which is an argument gun enthusiasts and their lobby are certain to field when McCarthy’s bill is debated. After that, the topic will fade – until the next mass shooting.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)