‘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