The above video features NRA executive Veep Wayne LaPierre from 2011 expounding a conspiracy theory about how the Obama administration plans to implement gun control in his second administration: "get re-elected, and with no other re-elections to worry about, get busy dismantling and destroying our firearms freedom." This sort of thinking is totally nuts but it explains the rightwing obsession with the Fast and Furious operation that was supposedly part of a nefarious Obama plan to—in David Limbaugh's words—"manufacture 'evidence' for tightening gun control legislation."
I reviewed the Steve Sailer book, America's Half-Blood Prince
(cobbled together from VDare columns) for Chronicles and debunked a similar argument:Sailer suggests that Obama will save his true self for a second term. “In Obama, ambition and caution are yoked. Becoming president is not his ultimate objective. Becoming a two-term president is. . . . Nixon’s first administration was one of the most liberal in American history. There were hints at the beginning of his second term, before Watergate . . .that Nixon, . . . intended to move toward his innate conservatism. That analogy suggests that a second Obama administration might more truly reflect the real Obama.” This is dubious. If Obama has studied recent history he will have noticed that recent second presidential terms have been become mired in scandal.Since the Democrats lost control of the House in the last election, even routine measures such as increasing the debt limit have become near impossible. The whole notion that Barack Obama plans to use a second term—currently somewhat in doubt—to enact some secret radical agenda known only to Wayne LaPierre and other delusional cretins is absurd.
Sailer is correct that Obama wants a second term—every president does; but if he wants accomplish anything, he needs to act while he has the votes in Congress and the support of the public.
