“CPAC’s Peddlers Of Resentment”: Calls For Fresh Ideas Followed By The Same Stale Shtick
Upon arriving Thursday at CPAC, the first thing said to me, squealed by a cheerful young conservative activist, was an admonition to “go upstairs, because Dick Morris is about to speak!” The following day, I could listen to the musings of Donald Trump (I skipped this, as did almost every other attendee). And Saturday, to end on a rousing and inspirational note, a speech by Sarah Palin. While Trump has the Apprentice on NBC, Morris and Palin have recently been fired from Fox News.
As I wrote on Friday, the ossified ideas offered by the former Fox heads were loudly challenged by Sen. Rand Paul’s insurgent movement of socially-tolerant Republicans. While the old guard complained about being unfairly treated by the press corps, Paul excited the crowd with a heavy dose of libertarian ideas slickly packaged for a conservative audience. CPAC organizers kept out New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and the gay activist group GOProud; perhaps they should have been paying more attention to Paul and the party’s libertarian wing.
On Saturday, Palin was dismissing as a liberal media slander the idea that conservatives were locked in an internecine ideological battle. The conference was full of reporters, she complained, “here to write their annual ‘conservatives in crisis’ story.” She doesn’t believe that the Republican Party is rudderless and beset by infighting—in a state of crisis—but there she was, the not-even-one-term governor turned reality television star, excoriating Republican consultant Karl Rove from the stage, along with the rest of those faux conservative quislings and quitters. From the big name speeches to the small panels discussions, there was virtually no mention of the Bush presidency (though conservative fossil Phyllis Schlafly managed an attack on George W. and George H.W. Bush from the dais). But there is most certainly not a crisis within the conservative movement.
“Fresh ideas,” one young Republican told me, “we need fresh ideas.” Yes, well. The conference would effectively close with the rather stale Palin, whose folksy incoherence always manages to always fill the seats, and a Breitbart.com-sponsored panel at which those who has been “uninvited” by CPAC (meaning not that they were barred, but that they weren’t invited to speak this year) could complain about the horrible mistreatment they’d endured at the hands of the conference organizers .Among that group was semi-pro conspiracy theorist and blogger Pamela Geller, who’d earlier charged that the annual conservative gathering had been “corrupted” and “compromised by Muslim Brotherhood activists.”
Palin’s speech was standard fare in comparison. There was the star of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” mocking the “reality television” world of Washington DC. Reading off of a TelePrompTer, she asked the president to “step away” from his TelePrompTer and “do your job.” And then she hoisted a 7-11 “Big Gulp” — evidently unaware that the drink would have been the one exception to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stupid regulation of big sugary drinks (thankfully halted at the last minute by a local judge).
Palin’s speeches are routinely described by her foes in the “lamestream media” (possibly the most irritating political neologism of the past decade) as “entertaining” and “crowd-pleasing”—descriptors that conservatives deploy too, and which the reader should always translate as “hopelessly devoid of ideas.” The “aw-shucks” tone, surplus of words ending with an apostrophe (the “amen, sista’’’ she offered to Margaret Thatcher, for instance), heavy reliance on one-liners that would make Shecky Greene cringe, and endless references to gun racks, dog sleds, and moose were all intended as a reminder just in case you forgot that she was from, to use her own, tired phrase, “real America.”
It’s transparent shtick, but for reasons this fake American fails to understand, the audience loves it.
And that’s always the takeaway from CPAC: it’s an event for activists (not intellectuals) who manage the rote recitation of keywords and fulsome references to conservative heroes. Sure, there were some interesting “breakout sessions” that transcended the rah-rah stump speech, but the stimulating ones I attended were sparsely attended.
This isn’t a conservative problem so much as it’s a problem with American politics. After Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster, even those pundits who disagreed with the Kentucky senator expressed relief that real ideas were being substantively debated on the senate floor. It’s a perennial suggestion that Washington needs something approximating Prime Minister’s Questions, in which Britain’s parliamentarians pepper their leader with questions and insults. Palin might be a hypocrite on this point, but American politics does indeed all too often resemble a reality show. (In comparison, the United Kingdom’s defense minister, William Hague, wrote a critically-acclaimed biography of Pitt the Younger, while Tory star and London mayor Boris Johnson is a newspaper columnist, former editor of The Spectator, and author of a novel and a work of history).
Like many CPAC attendees, Palin believes that the party doesn’t need new ideas, because those ideas—immigration reform and gay marriage, for instance—would supposedly betray conservative principles. Keep losing elections, but lose with dignity.
But it’s also that Palin isn’t in the ideas business. She is, as loudly reaffirmed in her CPAC speech, a peddler of resentment, and a worldview of conservative victimology obsessively focused on the media gatekeepers and corrupt political consultants they see distorting a political message that, if not interfered with by liberal ideologues, would be embraced by most all Americans. It’s a common theme at CPAC: it’s not our ideas, it’s how the media distorts our ideas. Circling the conference center was a truck sponsored by the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, displaying the message that the “liberal media” was “censoring the news.”
Perhaps Palin is correct that events like CPAC get a tough time from the media, but spending some time in the company of right-leaning journalists one realizes that CPAC skepticism is a bipartisan thing. Indeed, there were few conservative journalists or intellectuals—excepting the ideological insurgents of the Breitbart crew and assorted right-wing blogs—I spoke to that held the conference (or, in some cases, its attendees) in high esteem. As one conservative journalist told me, the conference had successfully transformed from “a conservative freak show into a general freak show.”
After three days at CPAC, one could have almost forgotten that the previous decade of Republican politics ever happened, when the party prepared for a permanent majority and a long war against Islamic extremism, circled the wagons in defense of George W. Bush, and believed complaints about civil liberties were deployed as a cudgel to undermine the president. If CPAC is an indicator of the state of conservatism—and I’m not entirely convinced that it’s much more than a poorly executed media event—then expect this civil war to be long and bloody.
By: Michael Moynihan, The Daily Beast, March 17, 2013
“VIP Donors And Partners”: Deep Pockets Back Organizer Of CPAC
The three-day Conservative Political Action Conference that began Thursday at National Harbor in Maryland showcases a wealth of conservative spending power from more than 200 right-leaning donors, foundations, universities, think tanks and activists who have collectively doled out more than $1 million to help underwrite the event.
The American Conservative Union, which is hosting the conference for the 40th consecutive year, offers underwriters a sliding scale of benefits at rates ranging from $3,000 for exhibitors to $50,000 for event “partners.” The ACU also lists some 100 “VIP donors” on its website, without indicating how much each gave.
Nine “partners” collectively paid $450,000 to enjoy benefits such as hospitality room access, color ads in CPAC publications, exhibit space and invitations to private meetings, dinners and receptions, according to the website.
The partners include Judicial Watch, the National Rifle Association and the Tea Party Patriots.
The event’s 21 “sponsors” — who shelled out $19,000 apiece for a total of $399,000 — include the Washington Examiner and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which according to tax records spent and gave out $40 million in 2011.
CPAC“co-sponsors” paying $8,000 apiece include the Susan B. Anthony List, which opposes abortion; the conservative grass-roots group Let Freedom Ring; and the Liberty University School of Law.
The ACU has long derived less influence from its budget than from its widely referenced scorecards and the CPAC gathering, which this year has drawn thousands of conservative activists and dozens of prominent elected officials and organizers.
But that is starting to change: The organization’s budget has quadrupled, from about $1.2 million in 2009 to $4.2 million last year, according to its tax filings.
Because the ACU is a 501(c)(4) social- welfare group, it is not required to report the names of its donors. But the group’s board includes the top executives of deep-pocketed players such as the NRA, which, according to tax records, had a $231 million budget in 2011; The Heritage Foundation, which had $80 million in expenses that same year; and Microsoft Corp.
The ACU’s political action committee raised and spent only about $120,000 in the 2012 election cycle, Federal Election Commission records show. But the ACU launched a super PAC in 2011 that raised and spent another $10,000 or so.
And the ACU itself made a $30,549 independent campaign expenditure on behalf of Republican Rep. Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee, according to the Sunlight Foundation, suggesting that the conservative group may be gearing up to raise its campaign trail profile.
By: Eliza Newlin Carney, Roll Call, March 14, 2013
“CPAC’s Guest List”: The New March Madness That Still Relies On Extremism And Extremists
It’s getting very hard to keep track of who is and is not allowed in the conservative movement these days. The issue of how much smaller the tent is getting always comes to a head at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, at which warring factions fight to keep each other off the guest list. In 2011, prominent anti-gay groups boycotted because the gay Republicans of GOProud were allowed to cosponsor the event. Last year, GOProud was banned but white nationalists and anti-Muslim extremists were allowed.
The guest list for this week’s conference is even more byzantine. Following last year’s bad publicity, the white nationalists have been disinvited. And anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller has been denied a panel slot, which she claims is because CPAC’s organizers are “enforcing the Sharia.” You know things are getting bad when CPAC has fallen to Sharia.
But excluding white nationalists and an anti-Muslim extremist doesn’t mean that CPAC has suddenly become a friendly and open-minded place. This year, gay groups did get a consolation prize: a rogue, unofficial panel “A Rainbow on the Right.” But don’t look for any rainbows inside — the conference still bars gay Republican groups from its official proceedings. And even without Pamela Geller, the conference will keep its strong anti-Islam tilt, hosting speakers who routinely attack American Muslims. And it’s not just gays and Muslims. New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who vetoed a marriage equality bill in his state, has been deemed too liberal to speak at the CPAC. So has Virginia’s Gov. Bob “Transvaginal Ultrasound” McDonnell, who apparently became some sort of leftist radical when he agreed to raise taxes to fund his state’s highways.
So who was conservative enough to make the cut for CPAC? War on Christmas analyst Sarah Palin, unhinged former congressman Allen West, and orange birther crusader Donald Trump, for starters. Mitt Romney has also been invited — presumably holding on to the right-wing makeover he underwent for his presidential campaign — though he loses top billing to his former running mate Rep. Paul Ryan.
In many ways, CPAC is caught in exactly the same bind as the Republican Party. The party’s leaders know that to survive in the long-term it must moderate its positions and expand its base. But they’re still in the grips of an extremist fringe that just won’t let that happen. Last year, fringe candidates like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock helped sink the GOP’s hopes of gaining seats in the Senate. This year, strategist Karl Rove has threatened to launch primary challenges against fringe candidates in an effort to keep the party relevant. But in doing so, he’s provoked the anger of the Tea Party, whose leaders correctly note that they’re the only reason the GOP has any power at all right now.
This year’s CPAC can be seen as a preview of the 2016 Republican presidential primary. The party’s main movers and shakers are trying to keep their base happy by turning away leaders like McDonnell and Christie who have deviated, in however small a way, from the party line. But they’re also trying to hide some of the most disturbing aspects of their party’s fringe.
McDonnell got snubbed for daring to fund a transportation bill. In his place, CPAC will highlight Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who led the legal charge against the Affordable Care Act and who is running to be McDonnell’s successor. White nationalists and Pamela Geller were ousted for being too far off the fringe, but Donald Trump, who’s devoted himself to claiming that the nation’s first black president isn’t a real American, is a highlighted speaker.
As hard as CPAC’s organizers may try, their guest list is still a mess. But the problem isn’t just the guest list, it’s what they’re serving. They’re trying to represent a movement — and a party — that wants the American people to think they got the message while still relying on extremists and insisting on a rigid orthodoxy. That’s a tall order for any party. And they can’t have it both ways.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post Blog, March 13, 2013
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