CPAC: The Delicate Dance Of Disassociating Oneself From “White Nationalist” Groups
Although much of the attention is on the main stage at each year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, it’s the side events where the real kookiness occurs. These events can give CPAC organizers and attendees a headache as they try to walk the line between accepting certain groups under the umbrella of the conservative movement, but also trying to make it clear they don’t want to associate themselves with some of those groups’ more questionable qualities.
Take for instance a session on the dangers of multiculturalism, that included participants from the website VDARE, which has been labeled as a white nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Rep. Steve King was one of those who had to walk the fine line. When questioned about the Southern Poverty Law Center’s description of his fellow panelists he first reacted by going on the offensive. “I wouldn’t be sitting up on a panel with anyone from the Southern Poverty Law Center,” King told reporters. “I’m not in a position to judge people in the fashion they seem to be so free to do.”
However, King then danced a delicate series of mental pirouettes. He explained his respect for VDARE’s top dog, Peter Brimelow, while holding back from a full-on embrace. Brimelow, he said, was not someone he’d met before the panel, though he had read his books.
“I just remember I’ve read his books and I put his name in my memory, and I just remember that his rationale was a rationale that I could track and I’m glad we have his voice,” he said in response to a journalist’s question about the pair’s relationship. Meanwhile, CPAC seemed to keep their distance, with a spokeswoman directing the Daily Caller’s Alex Pappas to the sponsoring organization for comment and pointing out that it wasn’t organized by the American Conservative Union.
The host of the event was officially the group ProEnglish, and their executive director, Robert Vandervoort. CPAC opened itself up to criticism in giving him a platform as well, given that he “was also the organizer of the white nationalist group, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance” according to the Institute for Research on Education and Human Rights.
Still, at least they got some thanks. Vandervoort praised the leaders of CPAC for “for standing up to the leftist thugs who wish to shut down this conference and our freedoms of speech and assembly.”
The panel discussion itself focused on the idea that multiculturalism and making accommodations for non-English speakers so they can do things like vote or get a public education, was a terrible thing for America to do.
Dr. Rosalie Porter, chairwoman of the board of ProEnglish and a former bilingual teacher who now thinks of bilingual education as an “insane idea,” said that part of multiculturalism is “the idea that every culture is equally valid, and one must never be judgmental and one must not say anything critical about a culture.”
Brimelow said bilingualism was “about the distribution of power in the society” and “the determination of the elites not to press immigrants to assimilate.” King was late for the panel and wasn’t even on the program, but he blended right in when he showed up, calling English the language of “success” and asking why the left was “obsessed” with multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism has even infected Republicans in the House, according to King. He recalled how an unnamed Republican leader wouldn’t let him be the floor manager of a bill he sponsored to make English the official language of the United States because he wasn’t an immigrant.
“I wanted to bring it up in the House, I was in a perfect position to do so, I had all the co-sponsors, I had worked it, I had earned it and the timing was right politically, and the answer that I got was ‘we’re looking for someone who is an immigrant or the son or daughter of an immigrant to be the floor manager of the bill’,” King said. “And the answer that I gave that unnamed leader was ‘I don’t think much of your affirmative action plan to select floor managers of bills.’ And so there’s a fear of criticism.”
By: Ryan J. Reilly, Talking Points Memo, February 11, 2012
The “Mau-Mauing” Of Mitt Romney
With Mitt Romney showing vulnerability yet again, it’s an interesting time to study the behavior of Republican elites. Most of them swarmed all over Newt Gingrich and denounced him as unacceptable after the South Carolina primary, when Gingrich had a window to win Florida and seize command of the race. In the course of doing so, many of them offered some kind words for Rick Santorum, who at the time was an also-ran. But you’re not seeing Party leaders try to rally around Santorum as the alternative to Romney. Instead they’re trying to jack up Romney for more policy concessions.
Romney’s plan for his campaign against Barack Obama is simple, and rooted in a clear-eyed reading of the data. He has one enormous asset, which is that Obama presided over an economic crisis. He wants to run against that. He does not want to run a campaign comparing the Republican vision to Obama’s vision, because Obama is both personally more popular than the Republicans, and his ideas are, in general, more popular as well. The House Republican budget is filled with wildly unpopular ideas — cutting taxes for the rich, privatizing and cutting Medicare, and deregulating Wall Street and the health insurance industry. Romney has endorsed the budget, which is now party scripture, but he does not want to run on it.
Conservative Republicans want to make sure that Romney isn’t just telling them what they want to hear only to get into office and govern the way he governed in Massachusetts. So they’re mau-mauing him, raking him over the coals for his timidity, and trying to force him to commit himself more publicly and openly to their agenda. The Wall Street Journal editorial page takes Romney to task today for proposing to index the minimum wage to inflation. (The minimum wage is set by law at a fixed dollar amount, so over time inflation erodes its value unless Congress passes regular increases.) Conservatives urge him to box out Santorum by adopting more right-wing position:
“There is not exactly Romney-mania right now,” Senate GOP Whip Jon Kyl told POLITICO, adding that the former Massachusetts governor “absolutely” must shore up the weaknesses with the GOP base that were on such vivid display Tuesday.
“Playing it safe, which Romney tends to do, is not going to get it for him,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a 2008 Romney supporter and a leading voice of his party’s conservative bloc, who called the results this week “a signal.”
And Paul Ryan, in a speech tonight to the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual Washington crazy-fest, prods Romney to abandon his strategy of running against Obama simply on the theme that the economy stinks:
I know there are people in this town who are terrified at the prospect of an election with real alternative visions at stake. “Make it a referendum. Win by default,” they say. “Just oppose — we can win that way. Don’t propose bold ideas — that’s too risky.” I’ll admit, the easy way is always tempting. But my friends, if that’s all we stand for, then what are we doing at here CPAC — the place where so many giants of our movement came to advance their boldest ideas? The next President will face fiscal and economic challenges that are huge, almost unprecedented. He can’t resolve these challenges if he wins by default. He needs a mandate — not just to displace Barack Obama, but to preserve and strengthen the very Idea of America.
This is, in fact, horrible advice. The bad economy is the only reason Republicans have a chance to defeat Obama in 2012, and Romney elevating the profile of Ryan’s ideas would be Obama’s best chance of hanging on if the recovery is still limping in November. Romney can still implement Ryan’s ideas if he wins without a mandate — look at George W. Bush in 2000, running as a compassionate, bipartisan critic of the GOP Congress, losing the popular vote, and implementing his agenda anyway.
I suspect conservatives don’t actually believe Romney needs to campaign on their ideas in order to implement them. They’d be perfectly happy with him running a stealth campaign, winning by being the out-party during a recession, and then implementing an agenda he soft-pedaled during the campaign. What they want is to ensure that Romney will really do it. So they’re trying to force him to shout it rather than whisper it. Once he wins the nomination, they’ll have no more leverage, so this is the time to make him do it.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 9, 2012
How The Right Brought The Trump Birther Madness On Itself
GOP primary voters should reward substance, rather than pols who masterfully exploit hot button issues. So why are so many Republicans embracing Donald Trump? They’ve been trained to elevate politicians based on the “tough” rhetoric they use rather than the record they’ve amassed. And to rally around anyone seen as being disrespected by the dread mainstream media.
The talk radio right bears much of the blame for these pathologies. Caught up in the Tea Party excitement, guys like Mark Levin used their platforms to act as apologists for Republicans like Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell. Didn’t they fire up the base? Weren’t they unafraid to zing President Obama? As Donald Trump rises in the polls, however, Levin is having second thoughts. The right is suddenly foolish to embrace demagogues with thin resumes and incoherent political philosophies. For all their differences, folks like Ross Douthat, David Frum, Reihan Salam, David Brooks, Daniel Larison, and many others have long been urging the GOP to pick its champions based on substance. You’ll never hear any of them urge that Donald Trump be taken seriously.
Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is defending Trump. Will Levin call out the woman whose political judgment he has frequently touted? Rush Limbaugh is inviting Trump on his show for softball interviews, and telling callers to his program that the celebrity billionaire ought to be taken “half-seriously.” Having announced that taking Trump at all seriously is idiocy of the highest order, will Levin openly criticize his fellow talk radio host? Or does this bully lack the courage to go after anyone with a bigger audience than his? Remember that the next time he tries to tell you that the reformers embody what’s wrong with the right. Like all bullies, his targets aren’t chosen based on desert.
In failing to call out the people most responsible for the right’s pathologies, Mark Levin is not alone. As Adam Serwer notes:
Trump’s candidacy is largely a problem of the GOP’s own making. It’s a symptom of circumstances Republicans have spent the last two years tacitly cultivating as an asset. Republican leaders have at best refused to tamp down the most outlandish right-wing conspiracy-mongering about the president and at worst have actively enabled it. The result: A substantial portion of their base believes a complete myth about the president’s birth certificate, and Republicans are stuck with a candidate shameless enough to exploit the issue without resorting to the usual euphemisms more respectable Republicans tend to employ when hinting at the president’s supposed cultural otherness. I don’t know how you solve a problem like Donald Trump, but I know it’s a problem the Republican Party brought on itself.
Indeed, half of the Iowa GOP are birthers. It’s so much of a problem that Ann Coulter and Karl Rove are out there assuring everyone that President Obama was in fact born in the United States. In doing so, they frame Birtherism as a trap liberals are setting. They’re implicitly criticizing all the mainstream voices on the right who’ve flirted with Birtherism, but are uninclined to name names, or to come right out and state that what those conservatives did has come back to bite the right.
Some of us have long insisted that the conservative movement was going to pay for its embrace of demagoguery, anti-intellectualism, bombast in place of substance, and shameless pandering. For our trouble, we’ve been dismissed by talk radio hosts and conservative bloggers, who took an ends-justify-the-means approach to the 2010 primaries and opposition to President Obama generally. Lo and behold, the conservative movement is now paying a price, exactly as predicted. The GOP has a weak field for 2012, and although Donald Trump isn’t going to win the nomination, his early status as a front-runner is an unwelcome distraction and may end up pulling other candidates toward the sort of absurd populism that will hurt them in a general election.
Even Mark Levin, Ann Coulter and Karl Rove now see these pathologies on the right, and the dangers they pose. So are they going to criticize the most prominent conservatives who brought these conditions about? Nope. There is never direct intra-movement criticism of Rush Limbaugh or Roger Ailes. There is never any appreciation of the pathologies encouraged by everyone who supported Sarah Palin. Instead we get self-righteous criticism that is too little, too late, and a cowardly refusal to confront the culpable parties in a way that would prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, April 21, 2011
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