Gun bill defeat is personal for Obama

President Barack Obama center leaves a news conference in the Rose Garden of the White House, Wednesday, April …
What happens to a president who romps to reelection, channels a national tragedy that sparked coast-to-coast outrage into a deeply personal crusade, then fails to get a measure backed by nine out of ten Americans through the Senate, where his party holds a majority? Thanks to the NRA-fueled defeat of a bill that might have mildly tightened limits on gun sales, President Barack Obama is learning the hard way.

For the families of those killed or wounded by gun violence and who watched with judging eyes as the Senate killed the measure by a vote of 54-46 (it needed a supermajority of 60 votes to pass) what to make of the vote was an easy call.

“Shame on you!” Patricia Maisch shouted from the visitors gallery above the Senate floor.

Maisch, a grandmotherly figure who disarmed the shooter in the Tucson carnage that nearly claimed the life of former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was happy to elaborate as reporters swarmed her after the vote. “I decided I could not sit still,” she said. “They have no souls, they have no compassion.”

But on Wednesday, they had the votes.

That’s Message One for Obama from this stinging legislative defeat: Having emotion and the majority on your side isn’t enough. NRA leader Wayne LaPierre, after all, didn't even need to show up.

The knock on Obama has often been that he’s Mr. Spock, viewing his approach as the most logical and assuming that logic will trump the other’s side’s arguments and emotions. But only the most cynical observers will argue that the president didn’t take this fight personally – with frequent flashes of very public anger and anguish ever since the slaughter of 20 schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary. And supporters of the legislation deployed the families of the slain as lobbyists in the weeks leading up to the vote.

Moreover, as the White House never tired of pointing out, polls show roughly 90 percent of Americans support expanded background checks.

"I will put everything I've got into this, and so will Joe," Obama promised in January, with Vice President Biden at his side. "But I tell you, the only way we can change is if the American people demand it."

In the end, though, four red-state Democrats joined 41 of the Senate's 45 Republicans to defeat the bill. Why stick their necks out for legislation whose death in the Republican-led House of Representatives was essentially foreordained?

"It came down to politics -- the worry that that vocal minority of gun owners would come after them in future elections. They worried that the gun lobby would spend a lot of money and paint them as anti-Second Amendment," Obama said in a passionate assessment in the White House Rose Garden after the vote. "And obviously, a lot of Republicans had that fear, but Democrats had that fear, too. And so they caved to the pressure, and they started looking for an excuse -- any excuse -- to vote 'no.'"

That would seem to bode ill for Obama in the early months of a second term. A reelected president at perhaps the height of his persuasive powers couldn't even get his own party in line behind this widely popular measure.

Obama's 2012 campaign juggernaut, overhauled and renamed Organizing for Action -- an unprecedented grassroots effort devoted entirely to advancing his agenda -- didn't tip the balance. There will be hard votes in the future on immigration, on taxes and spending, maybe on energy and climate change. He's doomed!

Message Two: No, he's not.

Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a staunch conservative and fierce Obama critic, told Yahoo News that Wednesday's vote was a fight over the Second Amendment. "I wouldn't think it has any broader implication" for Obama's agenda, he said.

So no spillover effect on immigration? "I don't think so," Cornyn said.

Sure, former President George W. Bush's second term never really recovered from his failed push to partly privatize Social Security. But that effort was powerfully unpopular, including among Republicans, while the goal of tamping down gun violence is broadly popular.

Which brings up Message Three: Obama's push on gun safety has suffered a terrible setback, but it's far from over.

Surrounded in the Rose Garden by parents of slain Sandy Hook schoolchildren, Obama never said the words "2014 mid-term elections." He didn't need to.

"We can do more if Congress gets its act together. And if this Congress refuses to listen to the American people and pass common-sense gun legislation, then the real impact is going to have to come from the voters," he declared. "You need to let your representatives in Congress know that you are disappointed, and that if they don’t act this time, you will remember come election time."

Maybe, but Message Four is that this White House needs to get better organized.

Democrats from states with large gun-owning populations complained privately that the Obama operation never seemed to know how to talk to gun owners. Several told Yahoo News that Obama hasn't really moved past his 2008 depiction of small-town Americans who "cling to guns or religon." Gun rights-favoring media, too, complained about the message.

There was a weird, telling little moment in the debate that highlighted the White House's struggle.

In early April, top Obama pollster Joel Benenson wrote a New York Times op-ed describing a poll his firm conducted that found, as he described it, that Americans don't really know what the country's gun laws actually say. Benenson was trying to beat back the core NRA argument against new gun laws: That authorities must enforce existing gun laws. But his column sent another message: That Team Obama had not really scrutinized the NRA argument until April.

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At more colleges, classes on genetics get personal

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) -- Bakir Hajdarevic didn't have to study for the most important test in a class last fall. He just had to spit — a lot.

The 19-year-old freshman at the University of Iowa took an honors seminar on personal genetics in which students had the option of sending saliva samples so a testing company could use DNA to unlock some of their most personal health and family secrets. The results would tell them how likely they were to get some forms of cancer, whether they were carriers for genetic diseases, where their ancestors came from, and a trove of other information.

The class, taught at Iowa for the first time, is part of a growing movement in higher education to tackle the rapidly advancing field of personal genetics, which is revolutionizing medicine and raising difficult ethical and privacy questions. The classes are forcing students to decide whether it is better to be ignorant or informed about possible health problems — a decision more Americans will confront as the price of genetic testing plummets and it becomes more popular.

Hajdarevic said he was eager to "find out about all the little mysteries" lurking in his DNA. Sure he was nervous that he might get bad news about cancer risks. But he said the curiosity to learn about himself — and whether he needed to take steps to improve his health — outweighed those concerns.

And so, one day last fall, he found himself in his dorm room struggling to spit into a test tube that he would mail to 23andMe, the Mountain View, Calif., testing company.

"It was like 10 minutes of spitting, literally," he recalled, laughing. "I ran out of spit really quickly. I was spitting for like 15 seconds and then I'd run out of juice."

Such episodes have become more common as similar classes have popped up on college campuses over the past three years with backing from 23andMe, which tests for about one million genetic variants possibly linked to tens of thousands of conditions and traits. The company announced in December it had raised $50 million from investors, and was cutting its price for its personal genotype testing from $299 to $99.

23andMe has offered universities discounts on the testing for the classes, along with course materials, and has partnered with dozens of universities and high schools. Stanford University, University of Illinois, the University of Texas and Duke University are some of the schools featuring courses on personal genetics this year, according to its website.

Some of the classes are geared toward medical, nursing and pharmacy students whose careers could be shaped by genetics, while others are for undergraduates hoping to learn more about a field often noted in popular culture. Most of the courses are electives, and students can opt out of the testing if they're uncomfortable. For students whose DNA is tested, the knowledge they glean is intensely personal and wide-ranging, from whether they are a carrier for cystic fibrosis to whether they are likely to be good sprinters.

This is a generation that grew up sharing details of their lives on Facebook, and these students said they were eager to know more about themselves.

"I thought the coolest thing about the whole class was that you would be able to test your own genetics to find out things about yourself. That's what drew me in," said University of Iowa freshman Morgan Weis, who plans a career in nursing. When her results came back, "I told my friends, 'Come look at this, it's so cool'. I was pretty excited about it."

This semester, Stanford professor Stuart Kim is teaching a class for medical students and graduate students in genetics and computer science for a fourth time. He says his students will never forget the class when they learn whether they are sensitive to the blood-thinner Warfarin; that knowledge could be critical if they ever suffer a stroke, because too large or small a dose could kill them. But he dreads the day when testing informs a student: That man who raised you? He's not your biological father.

"That will happen one of these days," he said.

He said 90 percent of the students have opted to test their own DNA rather than a random person's, and a class survey found that students who did so retained more information.

University of Iowa professor Jeff Murray has been teaching human genetics for 25 years, and developed last fall's class after reading about similar ones elsewhere. He talked through the pros and cons of testing with students, and spent two class periods examining 23andMe's consent form. Murray encouraged students to consult with their parents, through their consent was not required — students were all 18 or older. Only a few opted out of the testing after they or their parents raised concerns.

"Some people just didn't want to know if they are going to get breast cancer or Alzheimer's," said one of Murray's students, Alexis Boothe, 18. "Personally, I wanted to know."

She said she was not surprised when she learned she's seven times more likely than the average person to develop Crohn's disease, a bowel disorder, since it runs in her family. But now she said she can make sure not to smoke and watch her stress, two triggers. Boothe said she was amused when she learned that she shares northern European ancestors with the singer Jimmy Buffett, and when a third cousin she doesn't know sent her a message through the company.

For Hajdarevic, one surprising result was that he may be lactose intolerant. Although he's eaten dairy without issue his whole life, he can now monitor for symptoms that could develop later. He also learned he's a carrier for the mild form of a rare genetic disease, Alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency.

But overall, he says, he was relieved.

"I was kind of scared going in, like, 'Oh my God, I might have a high risk factor for some kind of cancer'," he said. "But knock on wood, according to the test, I don't really have much to worry about."

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