From Rendell’s interview with Time’s Mark Halperin today on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”:

They’re not afraid of the NRA. The NRA didn’t beat Barack Obama … Barack Obama carried Pennsylvania by 11 points, and we have the second highest amount of hunting licenses of any state in the union. I won by 20 percentage points when I ran for reelection.

So the NRA is a paper tiger. People should not be afraid of the NRA.

Yet when he’s asked if Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have been reluctant to push gun reforms due to the “political repercussions,” Rendell says that’s exactly the case.

Well, sure. They don’t want to upset the issues that are important on the nation’s agenda. And I agree with that. This gun control debate has been going on for awhile. It can wait while we straighten out the economy and get some health care coverage for all Americans. I understand that.

If there was a secret ballot in Congress on some of these issues, I believe you’d get 300, 350 votes for sensible gun control issues.

So the NRA instills no fear in Democrats but can sway hundreds of votes in Congress? Sounds like a paper tiger with a pretty fierce bite.

Few are saying it out loud, but the issue has a ring of class distinction surrounding it. That is, the White House has been quick to secure hundreds of billions of dollars for white-collar workers on Wall Street, but so far it’s balked at much smaller sums for state infrastructure projects or Detroit’s automakers. The message is clear: Trickle down, in the eyes of the Bush administration, trumps trickle up.

State leaders, however, are beginning to wonder when that trickle-down strategy will benefit them. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, said Monday that the long string of Wall Street bailouts has done nothing to help the middle class.

“We’ve seen a lot of federal help go to a lot of different organizations in the past few months but not any of that help has produced one new job,” Rendell told reporters. “Not any of that help has produced one new order of business for an American company.”

Rendell said the governors plan to push Obama for federal help with job-creating infrastructure projects and state-funded health-care programs.

States, faced with the burden of actually balancing their annual budgets, seem to have a legitimate need for both. Unemployment is up; home values are plummeting; retail sales are down; and the strain on social services is rising with every new jobless claim. In that environment, programs like food stamps and Medicaid, which cater to low-income folks, will be hit particularly hard.

“These are the safety net for our people across the nation, and the states are responsible,” said Joe Hackney, speaker of North Carolina’s state house.

In this fiscal year, states have already made cuts totaling $53 billion, Hackney said, with $90 billion in additional cuts projected to follow this year and the next. Faced with numbers like that, governors must feel like Jan. 20 can’t come quickly enough.