Huffington Magazine Issue 43 | Page 45

‘WE AREN’T GOING AWAY’ National Rifle Association chose hunters and sportsmen to hold what was regarded as a ceremonial post. “They had Charlton Heston, of course, but the presidents tended to be guys from Montana or Wyoming who knew very little about politics or Washington or the media,” said Craig Shirley, a political consultant and leading historian of the conservative movement. All of that changed in 2011, when the NRA chose Keene, a longtime board member at the gun rights group, for the two-year presidential assignment. He has a lifelong pedigree in conservative and Republican politics and has lived in Washington since the Nixon administration. As a student at the University of Wisconsin, he was president of the Young Americans for Freedom. He worked for Richard Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, and later in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. As longtime head of the American Conservative Union, Keene helped turn CPAC — the Conservative Political Action Conference — into the Sundance Festival of the GOP. “He’s the NRA’s first political president,” said Shirley. (Keene’s career also has been marked by trouble and controversy. HUFFINGTON 04.07.13 In a sad irony given his current role, his son David was sentenced to 10 years in prison for firing a gun during a road rage incident a decade ago. More recently, Keene’s former wife, Diana Hubbard Carr, pleaded guilty to embezzling funds from the American Conservative Union.) In his two years as NRA president, Keene has helped complete the organization’s transition. The NRA used to positioned itself as a nonpartisan piece of rugged Americana. Now it is frankly part “THEIR QUESTION WAS NOT ‘WHAT CAN WE DO TO PREVENT GUN CRIME OR MASS MURDERS?’ BUT ‘WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT GUNS?’” and parcel of the Republican Party and the conservative establishment. Democrats such as Rep. John Dingell of Michigan and Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada consider themselves friends of the NRA, but their party as a whole is being pushed in the other direction by President Obama and nominally former Democrat Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York. Keene, LaPierre and others