1988 was an interesting year in American politics.
It was the year when George H.W. Bush, with his anti-assassination insurance J. Danforth Quayle at his side, defeated Michael Dukakis. It was the year when Lowell Weicker, one of the Republican Senators who had angered the party leadership by backing the impeachment of Richard Nixon, finally fell at the hands of that same revenge-driven leadership, who backed a Democrat rather than allow him to win re-election to the Senate.
And it was the year Bernie Sanders lost his first Congressional race.
Sanders had been trying to get to Capitol Hill since 1974, when he ran as a third-party Senate candidate under the left-wing Liberty Union banner, nearly taking enough votes from Democratic candidate Pat Leahy to throw the election to Republican candidate Richard W. Mallary. He spent the rest of the ‘70s as the Chairman of the Liberty Union party, then ran in 1981 as a Socialist for mayor of Burlington, Vermont’s most populous city; he won the race and subsequent mayoral races, giving him eight years of experience on his political CV.
He ran for Congress in 1988 as a supporter of the assault weapons ban. It is this fact, and not the fact that the non-Republican vote was split between him and the Democratic candidate Paul N. Poirier, that Sanders blames for his loss to Republican Peter Smith that year:
Let’s also understand that back in 1988 when I first ran for the United States Congress, way back then, I told the gun owners of the state of Vermont and I told the people of the state of Vermont, a state which has virtually no gun control, that I supported a ban on assault weapons.
In 1990, Bernie Sanders ran for Congress again. This time, he won, beating Peter Smith soundly.
What changed in the intervening two years? Well, there was this:
When Congressman Smith went to DC, he had an epiphany of sorts about gun violence after going to a hearing featuring inner city youth:
“I’ll never forget, [the next day] brushing my teeth, looking in the mirror in my bathroom and realizing, as clear as day, I’m going to have to look at this face for the rest of my life in the mirror, and I want to be proud of the person I see,” Smith said. “I went back and looked up the gun bills.”
Smith found a bill to ban the sale of some assault weapons. He signed on as co-sponsor.
And that led to the NRA doing this:
A few days before Election Day in 1990, the National Rifle Association sent a letter to its 12,000 members in Vermont, with an urgent message about the race for the state’s single House seat.
Vote for the socialist, the gun rights group said. It’s important.
“Bernie Sanders is a more honorable choice for Vermont sportsmen than Peter Smith,” wrote Wayne LaPierre, who was — and still is — a top official at the national NRA, backing Sanders over the Republican incumbent.
That was odd. Sanders was the ex-hippie ex-mayor of Burlington, running as an independent because the Democrats weren’t far enough left. He had never even owned a gun.
But that year, he was the enemy of the NRA’s enemy.
Independent observers at the time were reasonably sure that the NRA’s support gave Sanders his victory:
In the one 1990 congressional race in which gun control appeared to be a decisive issue, Bernie Sanders unseated former Rep. Peter Smith, R-Vt., a gun- control supporter whom the NRA had squarely in its sights. Sanders, the only avowed socialist in Congress, voted against the Brady Bill.
The NRA`s political action committee pumped nearly $1 million into 1990 congressional races, including the Sanders-Smith race.
Just as two years earlier the Republican Party had used Joe Lieberman to exact its revenge on Lowell Weicker for doing the right thing, in 1990 the NRA used Bernie Sanders to exact its revenge on Peter Smith for doing the right thing.