Third Way Dispatch

A few weeks ago, some friends from Population Action International asked to meet with me about an international family planning bill that reduces abortion in the developing world through an effective and humane approach. Sound “Third Way”? It is.

Here’s a comforting thought. As gang members, drug dealers, terrorists, white supremacists and your basic garden variety thug are buying and selling illegal guns, the Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is obsessing over window treatments, wood paneling options, and soap dishes as he renovates his new office suite.

I have nothing against Feng Shui, but there is a time and place for choosing tile and a time and place for … well, doing your job.

In the case of ATF Director Carl Truscott, doing your job means enforcing the nation’s gun laws. But an Inspector General’s report that was uncovered today in the Washington Post, reveals that enforcing the nation’s gun laws is running a distant second to the ATF’s headquarters opulent construction project.

This dovetails nicely with the points we made in our Message Memo Taking Back the Second Amendment. Truscott’s obsession with decor provides progressives with yet another opportunity to point out this Administration’s failure to do their jobs when it comes to gun crime: enforcing the laws on the books.

“There are fewer abortions in America than at any point in the last three decades,” boasted President Bush in last night’s State of the Union Address. Seems impressive, until you consider that there are still 1.3 million abortions every year in America. How can the President gloat about that? How can he point to this area with pride when one in five pregnancies still ends in abortion?

With Washington all atwitter over ethics, congressional leaders in a stare-down over lobby reform legislation, and House Republicans this week choosing whether to elevate “the Congressman from Carnival Cruise” or “the Right Gentleman from Royal Troon” to the vacated Majority Leader post — we thought it wise to draft a document on ethics messaging. Our concern is that golf-playing, SPF 30-toting, pan-seared tuna-eating conservatives in Congress are successfully shifting the debate from ethics to legislation.

Third Way has just released a new strategy document called Winning the Abortion Grays, describing how progressives can win the battle of reasonableness on abortion and appeal to moderate Americans. The bottom line is this: we believe it should be an imperative to dramatically reduce the number of abortions in America, while protecting the right to an abortion.

There probably is no political issue that progressives handle more poorly than guns. Our problems begin with some basic misconceptions about who owns guns and why they own them.

So let’s get a few facts on the table: