Recently, Zell Miller of Georgia "published an op-ed piece in the Times that was, for a pol, astonishingly frank. Miller counseled his fellow Democrats to make more of an effort to understand southern culture to win national elections - the cold-water-in-the-face paragraph of Miller's piece warned that, if Bush took the same states in 2004 (after redistricting) that he carried in 2000, he would win not by four electoral votes but by eighteen He wrote, specifically, that Democrats should shut up about guns. Not necessarily change thir position; just be quieter about it (that was the frank part).

Jim Jeffords's defection from the GOP laid bare the nature of contemporary conservatism's much-commented-on problem: It's too southern, too zealous, too irascible. But there is a Democratic yin to that Republican yang. While Democrats have a lock on the urban vote (little-noted trendlet: White northern ethnics, after dalliances with Nixon and especially Reagan, have busically returned to the Democratic Party), and have gained a dead heat in the suburbs, in rural America, they're getting shellacked. And since presidential elections are decided state-by-state in the electoral college - Gore-Lieberman carried just 21 states (that includes D.C.) - and since so many states are so rural, Democrats have a problem. And because things in politics and journalism tend to get reduced to their simplest essences, 'rural America' and 'the South' boil down to 'guns.' DNC chair Terry McAuliffe, in laying out a new Democratic rural strategy, has even said that the party should ignore the gun issue and 'let the individual communities decide their gun laws.'

So it occurs to me [Michael Tomasky] to ask: Does the Democratic Party platform affirm the right of law-abiding citizens to keep arms, and, if not, should it? 'I don't know,' [Joe] Lieberman says. 'That's a hell of a question. Yes, it should. It should. I've always said that, throughout my career in Connecticut.'

'The constitutional question is at least unresolved,' he continued, adding that his goal is to go after 'the laws that llow criminals and others who shouldn't have guns get them.'

Later, I checked on the platform. A phrase inside one sentence speaks of 'respect' for 'the rights of hunters, sportsment, and legitimate gun owners.' But what Lieberman seems to be open to is something else altogether: an explicit acknowledgment from the Democratic Party that the Second Amendment, which liberals have generally argued was intended to apply only to state-sponsored, 'well-regulated militias,' applies to individuals..." (Michael Tomasky, New York Magazine, June 18, 2001).