David Keene

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David Keene during the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC

David A. Keene (born May 20, 1945 in Wisconsin ) is an American political activist and lobbyist. From 2011 to 2013 he was President of the National Rifle Association .

Life and activity

Keene is the son of two Wisconsin union activists. After attending school, he studied law at the University of Wisconsin Law School . In the 1960s Keene began to be politically active. In 1960 he distributed leaflets for John F. Kennedy , in 1964 he promoted Barry Goldwaters' presidential nomination . During the time of the Nixon administration he worked as a political assistant to the then US Vice President Spiro Agnew . He then worked for various Republican politicians such as James L. Buckley , Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush .

From 1984 to 2011, Keene served as chairman (chairman) of the American Conservative Union (ACU), which is considered to be one of the leading bodies in the organization of the conservative forces in the United States and which is generally considered to be a significant influence on the right-wing of the political spectrum in the United States is attributed. The ACU is best known as the sponsor of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which de facto represents a kind of joint party congress of the Republican Party and various other organizations with a conservative orientation, on which internal networking of the conservatives takes place and on which many leading figures the "conservative movement" (Republican top politicians, highly regarded conservative television and radio presenters, prominent representatives of lobby organizations, free churches, etc.) to give speeches. Under Keene's aegis, CPAC grew from an event that only a few hundred people attended in the early 1980s to a major event on the American Conservative calendar with more than 10,000 visitors a year.

In May 2011, Keene was elected President of the National Rifle Association. His successor in the ACU meanwhile took over the former leader of the Republican Party in Florida , Al Cardenas. In the run-up to the 2012 elections , he repeatedly stated that he saw the main goal of the NRA during these elections to be to prevent US President Barack Obama from being re-elected.

Keenes was widely judged to be an extremely important and effective man in his role as a set-pusher. His shirt-sleeved determination as a political operative earned him the nickname Baby Doc David Keene , an allusion to the Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier . NRA board member Grover Norquist has compared Keene to the film character Forrest Gump : Just as the film hero was tossed (albeit involuntarily) from one central event of current affairs to the next, Keene has been at the center of conservative events for decades. Another comment stated that Keene was one of the few men who had the ear of Republican presidents and at the same time had the ability to influence the conservative base (“one of the few men with both the ear of Republican presidents and an ability to influence the grassroots ").

Keene is a second marriage and has three children from her first marriage and two adoptive daughters. Media attention was drawn to the fact that his son David Michael was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for first-degree attempted murder after he moved from his car to another vehicle on the road during a traffic dispute in 2002 George Washington Memorial Parkway in Virginia had fired with a gun, with the driver of the other vehicle barely injured.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ NRA-ILA: David Keene elected President; Wayne LaPierre Re-elected Executive Vice President of National Rifle Association . May 2, 2011
  2. ↑ a b Patrick Bahners : Gun lobbyist David Keene: The freedom of the gun. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . December 22, 2012, accessed March 17, 2013 .
  3. ^ A b c Andy Barr: The Complex Legacy of David Keene. In: Politico. February 13, 2011, accessed March 17, 2013 .
  4. ↑ Ronald Kessler: David Keene Takes over the NRA. In: Newsmax. March 28, 2011, accessed March 17, 2013 .
  5. ↑ Josh Sugarmann: New NRA Prez David Keene's Son Is a Convicted Road-Rage Shooter. In: The Huffington Post . February 5, 2011, accessed March 17, 2013 .
personal data
SURNAME Keene, David
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Keene, David A. (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American political activist and lobbyist
DATE OF BIRTH May 20, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Wisconsin