There’s at least one clear winner in the debate over President Barack Obama’s new gun control executive actions: Hillary Clinton.

How many guns Obama’s new rules will actually take off the streets or what kind of effects they’ll actually have on reducing violence are, at best, open questions. Even the National Rifle Association went out of its way to downplay their significance.


The new batch of executive actions are more about the politics of pushing the issue forward—and the White House and Clinton campaign are both thrilled with how well it’s working so far.

Clinton’s heading into the final weeks of a primary challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose record in Congress voting against gun restrictions is a rare diversion from Democratic base orthodoxy. Then she’ll head into a general election looking for more reasons to call Republicans extremist and out of touch.

After months of repeatedly being out of sync with the White House — on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, on the Keystone XL pipeline, on immigration reform, on Syria — she’s gone out of her way to embrace Obama’s opening move for 2016, praising the gun control actions at every campaign trail stop she’s made since New Year’s, including Tuesday, when she gushed to an Iowa town hall about how “very proud” she is of the president.

Clinton made sure to take some credit along the way. “I’m very proud of what the President called for this morning with his executive order,” she told an energetic crowd of supporters packed into an ornate theater in Sioux City, Iowa. “I was pleased because some of what he’d called for, I’d advocated for a couple months ago in the debates and in the campaign.”

She pointed to her support for more stringent background checks, closing a variety of loopholes and her opposition to allowing anyone on the terrorism "no-fly" list to purchase a gun. Clinton, saying she wanted to appeal to “responsible gun owners,” stressed she saw a path to reform that would be “in accord with the Constitution.”

“For heavens’ sake, we all need to be more responsible, there’s nothing wrong with that,” she said. “I’m going to keep standing up and fighting to keep guns out of the hands of fugitives and felons and terrorists and people who have mental health, serious problems and the like, and I need your help to do that.”

Gun control is an issue, a Clinton campaign aide said, that works for her in both the primary and general election. Just look at the 90 percent support for background checks among independent and suburban voters in battleground polls, the aide said.

"At least one of the Democrats who’s running is going to make it a pretty big issue," Clinton endorser Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-Conn.) said as she left the White House after Obama’s call to action on Tuesday.

"She’s on the right side of the issue and she knows it’s the right thing to do," said Commander Mark Kelly, co-founder of Americans for Responsible Solutions and Giffords’ husband. “You could draw a bigger contrast between her and any of the presumed Republican candidates. … She’s got the American people on her side on this issue — at least the majority.”

White House aides insisted that Obama’s announcement wasn’t done for Clinton, though they acknowledge privately that it's likely to be prime issue for the general election.

What’s more on their minds is what this does for Obama, who stormed into 2016 hoping to replace any final year, lame duck narratives with evidence of a president who’s still making an impact and stirring the political conversation.

Obama set out to reframe what’s become one of the great entrenched issues of American politics, and what’s been a consistent failure for the West Wing. He believes in Second Amendment rights, Obama said in extensive remarks in the East Room, but those don’t get to outrank the rights to assemble, the right to worship freely, and the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — all of which, he said, have been taken away from victims of mass shootings.

"We do not have to accept this carnage as the price of freedom,” Obama said.

Wrapping himself in the emotion of the Sandy Hook father who introduced him and former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) in the front row, tearing up as he invoked the murdered first graders whose deaths made him weep openly three years ago, Obama placed gun control in the canon of American long-term struggles alongside women’s suffrage, African-American liberation and LGBT rights.

“He’s trying to have a softer, saner conversation, and the Republican candidates for president don’t want to have that discussion,” said Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, speaking outside the White House after attending the president’s speech. “Each is crawling all over one another to get out of the clown car first to make the best argument to the most radical within their ranks.”

Meanwhile, Obama gets to do some of his favorite things: rail against Washington inaction, a Republican Congress detached from an American public which polls show widely supports new gun control measures, and a big entrenched lobby he says is full of liars. He gets to smack Republicans around with reminders that a long list of their past leaders, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to John McCain to the NRA once supported background checks.

And he gets to beat up Republican presidential candidates, whom he gleefully started in on from the White House on Tuesday.

Republican responses varied between "this is nothing" to "this is terrible" to "this is a distraction from the fight against terrorism" to "this is politics."

Hillary Clinton: 'Proud' of Obama's gun measures Hillary Clinton talks about President Obama's new measures addressing guns.

“The fact is that President Obama’s proposals would not have prevented any of the horrific events he mentioned,” said National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action executive director Chris Cox, in a statement. “The timing of this announcement, in the eighth and final year of his presidency, demonstrates not only political exploitation but a fundamental lack of seriousness.”

“In the wake of the president’s vow to ‘politicize’ shootings, it’s hard to see today’s announcement as being about more than politics,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

McCain didn’t give Obama any cover, taking issue with the process rather than the background checks he’s supported in the past.

“Regardless of merit,” McCain said in a statement, “this is a classic abuse of executive power.”

There’s no time to wait, Obama said, and though he acknowledged explicitly that gun control won’t pass during this Congress or his presidency, he urged voters to turn gun control into a single-issue voting issue, for elections all the way down the ballot.

“The reason Congress blocks laws is because they want to win elections. If you make it hard for them to win an election if they block those laws, they’ll change course, I promise you,” Obama said.

However, later that afternoon, White House press secretary Josh Earnest admitted that Obama probably wasn’t ready to become a single-issue voter himself. Earnest ducked any promises about Obama’s supporting pro-gun control Republicans when he does his own campaigning in the fall, or telling voters to support someone like Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, whom Obama name-checked in his remarks for his post-Sandy Hook legislative efforts.

Obama and Toomey disagree on too many other issues, Earnest said, adding that he’s confident that the Democrat who emerges from the primary there will anyway be more in line with the White House on gun control than Toomey.

“It’s hard to imagine a situation where the president is willing to campaign for Senator Toomey,” Earnest said.

Democrats in the White House and beyond see a much easier answer for how gun control will play for Clinton in the presidential election.

“I think a Democrat’s going to win, and I think they’re going be for this issue,” said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), speaking in the East Room after Obama finished. “And I think it will help.”

Katie Glueck contributed to this report from Sioux City, Iowa.

