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"God, guns and gays."
Howard Dean said when elections in the South are run on those issues, Republicans win and Democrats lose.
That's why Dean and his Democratic White House rivals want to change the subject to jobs, health care and education.
They're called "wedge" issues, because they divide voters. They're also the grist of direct mail and TV ads in the final weeks of a campaign.
God and gays will have to wait a bit. But the gun issue has surfaced as a wedge issue in Florida in 2004, and it provides a revealing glimpse of what the upcoming legislative session will be like.
The National Rifle Association is lobbying for blanket immunity for more than 400 gun ranges from liability for groundwater contamination caused by lead from spent shells.
To the Sierra Club and the state Department of Environmental Protection, it's a public health issue, which is why they are both up in arms. But supporters, led by the NRA's Marion Hammer and numerous legislators, make their arguments in stark Second Amendment terms.
Force a gun range to clean up its act, they say, and it's a short step to taking people's guns away.
Hammer calls DEP employees "bullies" for trying to shut down the Skyway Skeet and Trap Club in Pinellas Park. The range is near a county park and has spewed lead all over land and water owned by the Southwest Water Management District, the district's attorneys say.
The district and DEP sued the club, but the bill would kill the lawsuit.
"This bill will stop any agency and political subdivision from using its bureaucratic power to impose back door gun control," Hammer testified.
(Private lawsuits would still be okay, lest the NRA incur the opposition of the one group with the political clout to kill the bill: trial lawyers.)
In a House committee last month, opinion broke down along party lines. Republicans voted for gun range immunity, and Democrats voted no.
But when the bill reached the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, something very different happened. Sen. Rod Smith, a Gainesville-area Democrat who plans to run for governor in 2006, sensed the NRA was trying to box him in as antigun. He voted for gun range immunity, albeit with a string of caveats about how the state needs a "cleanup strategy."
"In my neck of the woods, I have a lot of hunters and sportsmen," Smith said. "Having said that, we've got to clean it up."
Smith has plenty of sportsmen and hunters in his district, and he has a nasty scar on his right hand from a boyhood injury when his dad's old J.C. Higgins shotgun misfired.
Some of Smith's friends are dismayed to hear that he's cozying up to the gun lobby.
"We as Democrats need to be good stewards of the environment," said Rep. Jack Seiler, D-Fort Lauderdale, who says he supports the Second Amendment but voted against the bill in the House. "This is not a good environmental bill, and it has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. ... It's the NRA trying to manipulate the process."
Like Howard Dean, Smith is a Democrat with a gun-friendly background.
Dean's Democratic rivals, especially Sen. John Kerry, have ripped him for being soft on gun control. But which man is the more likely Democratic presidential nominee?
If Smith's pro-NRA vote will bite him, it will be not from a Republican, but from a liberal Democratic opponent in the 2006 primary.
Liberals won't like Smith for siding with the NRA, but he doesn't seem to mind. He's figured out that a Democrat has big trouble winning statewide without votes in North Florida.
- Steve Bousquet is the deputy capital bureau chief of the Times.