Sixty years ago, Phyllis Schlafly's campaign ode to Republican candidate Barry Goldwater helped to define modern conservativism by describing it as his campaign as a "choice, not an echo." Schlafly's contention was that Goldwater's campaign offered Republican voters a chance to break from the party establishment and choose a candidate who represented real conservatives instead of the "kingmakers" in the GOP. 

As we discuss with Armed American Radio's Mark Walters on today's Bearing Arms' Cam & Co, Democrats are now offering their own voters an echo instead of a choice. While Joe Biden (or at least Biden's X account) has departed the campaign, the Democratic establishment is busily engaged in some queenmaking of its own by trying to lock down her nomination as the new candidate before the DNC kicks off in Chicago next month.  

Walters and I agree that the power brokers in the Democratic party are likely to get their wish, as well as the fact that this could come back to bite them big time between now and November. 

You've got this party that's claiming to want to protect democracy that in the process is absolutely subverting democracy by disenfranchising, I guess the number is 14 million primary voters, who now have had their votes literally tossed out the window by the party elites, and that should scare every American. I know it's being talked about by a lot of pundits, as it should be. What they've just done is take democracy, as they like to say, and tossed it right out the window. 

Harris may be the best choice for Democrats going forward, if for no other reason that she'll continue to have access to the money that the Biden/Harris campaign has raised to date. But by doing their best to avoid an open convention, the "pro-choice" party is trying to deny delegates the opportunity to make a real choice about who their candidate will be, and it's not just Second Amendment advocates like Mark Walters and I who think that could pose a problem for the left in the days to come. 

At the Atlantic, staff writer Graeme Wood (no fan of Donald Trump), says Democrats are making a "colossal mistake" by trying to lock down Harris as the nominee. 

The error is not the choice of Kamala Harris. It is the sudden rallying behind her, the torrent of endorsements, right after Biden’s self-removal. Biden’s senescence was only part of the party’s crisis. The other part was the impression that Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning. For 27 minutes, between the time Biden announced his withdrawal and the time he broke the seal on Harris endorsements by bestowing his, the contest felt thrillingly, bracingly wide-open. The Democrats should have kept it open all the way into the convention next month, in Chicago.

Technically, there'll be an open convention regardless of what happens between now and the start of the DNC. Now that Biden is no longer the nominee, the delegates technically aren't bound to any candidate. But the party establishment clearly wants to avoid any possibility of a fractious and chaotic convention by making Harris the de facto nominee, even at the expense of their talking points about being the party that would best protect political norms. 

Walters and I also discussed who Harris might name as her running mate if Democrat voters are unable to prevail on party leaders to allow for a truly competitive convention. Somewhat to my surprise, Walters named Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as the candidate who might pose the biggest threat to gun owners. Walters says that while Shapiro has an anti-gun record that's just as hostile to the Second Amendment as individuals like Sen. Mark Kelly, he's not nearly as well-known. Shapiro has also done a very good job of posing as a moderate on many issues, though he's anything but middle-of-the-road when it comes to the right to keep and bear arms. 

Shapiro signed on to an amicus brief arguing against "shall issue" concealed carry laws when he was Pennsylvania's Attorney General, and has advocated for things like "universal" background checks and "red flag" laws in the years since. Though Shapiro downplayed his support for gun control in his gubernatorial campaign (not even including it among the issues highlighted on his campaign website), he still received the endorsement and support of anti-gun groups like Giffords and Everytown, who anointed him one of their "gunsense" candidates in 2022. 

Walters says he's still confident that, no matter who the Democrat ticket ultimately consists of, Donald Trump will remain the frontrunner. Still, he doesn't want to see gun owners and Second Amendment supporters become complacent; another point of agreement between the two of us. Harris has a number of issues, including helping to gaslight the American people about Biden's physical and cognitive health, but conservatives can't afford to believe that Democratic disarray will automatically lead to Republican victory this fall. 

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