Mike Stark is at CPAC too and he picked up on a pretty big absence. Though CPAC boasts over 6,000 guests and at least half of them are College Republicans and though CPAC hosted a job fair for three hours Friday for conservative political vendors, campaigns, think tanks and organizations, the U.S. military was not invited to have recruiters stationed anywhere within the Conservative Political Action Conference. Stark has a theory about this:

Let’s try this: CPAC didn’t want to be embarrassed when pictures were released that showed recruiters standing around looking lonely. Similarly, recruiters know it’s a better investment of their time to troll “the other malls” rather than to recruit these nice white college boys.

While I did see a number of military veterans and Citadel cadets in attendance – and the panel “The Left’s Repeated Campaign Against the American Soldier” included many questions from veterans in the audience – it was surprising that there wasn’t any drive within the community to recruit amongst itself. I guess there just isn’t a desire for these war hawks to put their money where their mouths are – or more specifically, their asses where their mouths are.

Drumming up support for a war is not nearly as admirable as serving in the war that you believe in, folks. While there will always be a place for professional pundits and war hawks like MIchelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg to agitate for more wars, there simply aren’t enough paying gigs and syndicated column spots for that role to be available to all the College Republicans here who are not already serving in the military.

So come on guys, while you’re laughing at speaker after speaker bash the left for wanting to end the war in Iraq (while avoiding ever uttering the word “Iraq”), take a moment and swing by the nearest recruiting station and pitch in. Odds are you won’t be the next Dinesh D’Souza or Ann Coulter and your services are needed in the war you so piously support.

Also, don’t miss Nancy Scola’s indictment of the conservative movement for their continued adoration of Ann Coulter.

Technorati Tags: Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, CPAC 2007

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Updated below

Cross posted at The Huffington Post

I’ve been highly critical of Romney’s campaign for the last four months. I find it tremendously hard to believe that a candidate who was fundraising and voting for Democrats fifteen years ago and arguing that he was to the left of Ted Kennedy would ever be able to secure support from the activist Republican base. His history and image makes him a ripe target for opposition research and there are just too many videos on YouTube of Romney contradicting himself to believe that people will buy him as a conservative. Frankly, I’ve been ready to call Romney’s candidacy dead for quite some time (the Fox News poll showing him at 3% nationally definitely furthered my thinking on that point).

I didn’t expect a very positive response to Romney at CPAC. This audience is made up of some of the most informed voters in the conservative coalition (a fact that will come up later in this post) and information isn’t Romney’s friend. News had already broke that Romney was paying to bring dozens of students to come to CPAC to get them to get to vote for him in the conference straw poll.

All of that set me up to be proved wrong by the audiences’ response to Romney and I was. Romney fed the audience a steady diet of red meat: pledges to cut taxes and reduce the size of the government, anti-immigrant rhetoric, anti-abortion lines, and promises to continue to block efforts to legalize gay marriage.

Despite loud applause on many of the tax lines, the purchased student fans were pretty much invisible. Not much sign waving or foam mitt waving, even though Romney paid to bring them to the event. But the rub of that is that the applause he was getting seemed very organic and not canned.

The point seems to be, as one person I spoke with said, that conservatives don’t have a problem with conversion stories like Romney’s. He’s seen the light and now he is ideologically where they want him to be. That’s what will likely matter to the Republican base, even if McCain, Giuliani, and other Republican opponents run flip-flop videos on YouTube or have someone dress up in a dolphin costume to walk around CPAC.

Romney did pick up Ann Coulter’s endorsement today. After her panel, a questioner asked who she would pick amidst the Republican field and Coulter replied that “He [Romney] is probably our best candidate.” She added, “Romney tricked liberals into voting for him. I like a guy who hoodwinks liberals so easily.” [Andrew Sullivan confirms this quote.]

Of course, Coulter’s more notable comment wasn’t about Romney, but Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards. “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word “Faggot.” The CPAC audience hooted and hollered their approval of Coulter’s blatant homophobia, something that they knew would likely manifest itself during her talk.

Earlier in his speech, Romney said, “I’m happy to learn that after I speak you’re going to hear from Ann Coulter. That’s a good thing. I think it’s important to get the views of moderates.” It is truly shameful that Romney thinks it’s a good thing for Coulter to spew her bigotry at anyone, let alone a candidate for the presidency. Does Mitt Romney agree with Coulter’s homophobia? Does he think there’s something wrong with being gay, as Coulter clearly does? Romney values Coulter’s support because, as Glenn Greenwald notes, “she reflects [the] true impulses” of the conservative movement.” It is the same part of the conservative movement that is in attendance at CPAC every year and it is who Romney came to court and Coulter came to speak to.

Not surprisingly, Mitt Romney’s campaign website printed only excerpts of his CPAC remarks. Praise for Ann Coulter isn’t something that Romney would actually want the whole world to know about, only the select few true conservatives at CPAC. That didn’t stop Romney from releasing the full text of his speech to RedState.com, which they dutifully published. Surprisingly it was not scrubbed of Romney’s praise for Coulter or his joking approval of her as a moderate.

To go with the homophobia by Romney’s most famous supporter, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist introduced Romney. Norquist’s family is originally from Massachusetts, a fact that Norquist reminded the CPAC audience during his introduction of Romney. “He’s from my home state of Massachusetts, before my family emigrated to America.”* Norquist went on to praise Romney’s accomplishments by again belittling the state of Massachusetts, “He has done all of this not in Texas or Florida or some normal part of the United States, but in Massachusetts.” The implication is clear: Norquist thinks Massachusetts is not a real part of America.

Does Romney hate Massachusetts? Does he think it’s not part of the United States of America and deserving of being the butt of jokes at CPAC? The absurdity of these questions demonstrates the comfort Romney maintains associating himself with people who speak to the most vile portions of the conservative movement and are loved for it. His appreciation of Coulter’s and Norquist’s support is a clear indication that his campaign wants to be defined by its proximity to hateful figures, just so long as it leverages them votes within the conservative Republican base. That’s why his meat and potatoes speech at CPAC was so well received and why Romney will not place any meaningful distance between himself and cheerleaders of hate like Coulter and Norquist.

Update

Moe Lane of RedState interviewed Romney after he received Coulter’s endorsement. Romney said, “I love all endorsements.”

Also, prominent Republican bloggers get that Coulter’s remarks were wrong and that her style of speech is an anchor around conservative credibility. Ed Morrissey of Captain’s Quarters offer the strongest rebuke, along with RedState diarist Nathan Nelson. Michelle Malkin, Dean Barnett and John Hawkins are in the mix disapproving of Coulter calling Edwards a faggot.

One question, though. If prominent right wing bloggers so clearly understand why Coulter’s remarks were wrong, why doesn’t the Mitt Romney campaign get it? Why does he still love her endorsement?

*All quotes included in this post is based on live transcription. I cannot assert they are 100% accurate.

Technorati Tags: Ann Coulter, Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, CPAC 2007, Grover Norquist, Mitt Romney

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Ann Coulter, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference: “I was going to talk about the other Democratic candidate John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word “Faggot.”

Updated 3/2/07, 5:06pm [by Matt Ortega]: See the video.

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Coulter has publicly endorsed former Governor Mitt Romney (R-Massachusetts). DNC Chairman Howard Dean issued a brief statement demanding the GOP candidates denounce the slur.

CPAC | 2 Comments »

I’m at CPAC and will be providing periodic updates on the conferences events. Unfortunately there is no wifi within the conference area and I have to post from the lobby. As such, some of the posts contain less background linking than I would normally prefer.

Recent polls have lead to a shift in Conventional Wisdom, with major political analysts leaning towards announcing Rudy Giuliani as the new front-runner for the Republican presidential primary.

Giuliani’s speech was mostly about his tenure as mayor and his admiration for Ronald Reagan. Giuliani spent enough time talking about Reagan’s legacy and Reagan’s vision to fight the spread of communism to make one think that he’s running against Michael Dukakis in 1988. The speech meandered from anecdote to anecdote while making few larger points about what his current campaign was about. This style plays into what people know about Giuliani — America’s mayor. A man who loves baseball and dresses in drag, but just for fun. Hey, we all like fun, right?

This was not a red meat speech. The first twenty-minutes didn’t deliver any major applause lines and while his jokes got some chuckles, he didn’t hit the home run that his raucous entrance produced. The Republican audience liked the idea of Giuliani’s Workfare program, though I think I could safely bet that the vast majority of these conference goers have never spoken with someone who receives welfare nor themselves benefited from this social program. Instead it exists as an undefined evil that never actually shows its head in their lives, like the war in Iraq.

Giuliani must have thought that his new-found front-runner status would afford him with a platform to speak about more arcane policy points, at least as far as what conservative voters are concerned about thus far in the election. Privatizing public schools may interest the former mayor of New York City, but I don’t see any competing candidates spending fifteen minutes talking about education. The question is, does Giuliani actually have this power? Will he, in the end, have provided a speech that inspires support along lines other than immigration, abortion, and terrorism? If so, then I’ve both underestimated the Republican base and underestimated the capacity for a major Republican presidential candidate to separate himself from the parameters of debate set forth by the Bush administration and the Republican Party to talk about issues that don’t explicitly function on the existential threat of Islamic terrorists.

In the context of presidential speeches offered by candidates talking about their vision for national policy on security, immigration, taxation, and conservative social values, Giuliani’s talk about New York’s welfare program, public schools, and hotel tax cuts does not sound impressive. This is the sad reality of Giuliani’s fame as America’s Mayor: he was mayor before 9/11/01 and most of his actions are not going to sound grand next to the work of his competitors. His work was mundane, as is the nature of municipal politics. It wasn’t the sort of work that the conservative movement spends a lot of time talking about, even if Giuliani ruled with hardline, authoritarian guiding principles that any Bush follower would be proud of.

Giuliani did eventually get around to talking about terrorism, the issue that has propelled him to the top of the Republican presidential field. Once on topic, he sounded like a dutiful follower of the Bush/Rove playbook, denouncing Democrats for being on the defensive before 9/11 and for previous efforts to treat terrorists like criminals. Giuliani lavished praise on the Patriot Act and electronic surveillance programs that illegally spy on American citizens. Giuliani went so far as to draw parallels between his lawful use of electronic surveillance on the Gambino crime family as a prosecutor and the Bush administration’s current unlawful surveillance and data mining of American citizens suspected of no crime whatsoever.

The only place where Giuliani seemed to stray from Bush doctrine was on choice of words used to describe the fight against Islamic terrorists. “Maybe we made a mistake by calling this the war on terror. This is not our war on them. This their war on us. We desire peace – we want to sell you something, we want to do business with you. This war is over when they stop planning to come here and kill us. Until then we have to remain on offense against terrorists.”*

Rudy Giuliani only mentioned Iraq once and did so in the context of denouncing the Democrats’ efforts to end the war. This has been consistently true of the presidential candidates; Iraq is not an issue that they are talking about here (Sam Brownback mentioned Iraq once).

Giuliani’s speech fell flat. It was better suited for an audience of independent, undecided voters, not the heart of the Republican Party’s conservative activist base. I don’t know why Giuliani thought this kind of salad speech would succeed at the largest gathering of conservatives to date in the campaign. Maybe he just isn’t serious about running for president, though that would be shocking for a candidate who is performing so strongly in the polls.

For what it’s worth, Giuliani left the hall to significantly softer applause than what he was greeted with at his entrance.

*All quotes included in this post is based on live transcription. I cannot assert they are 100% accurate.
Cross posted at Huffington Post

Technorati Tags: Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, CPAC 2007, Rudy Giuliani

CPAC, Rudy Giuliani | 4 Comments »

Michelle Malkin posted an image of the now infamous “Rudy McRomney” sticker floating around the Conservative Political Action Conference.

CPAC, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani | 2 Comments »

I’m at CPAC and will be providing periodic updates on the conferences events. Unfortunately there is no wifi within the conference area and I have to post from the lobby. As such, some of the posts contain less background linking than I would normally prefer.

Duncan Hunter
I missed Rep. Duncan Hunter’s speech, but was able to catch the question and answer session with him adjacent to Senator Jim Inhofe’s rant against the evils of global warming, or to be more specific, the evils of believing in global warming and being critical of people like him who don’t believe in science.

Hunter’s Q&A meandered through anecdotes about his father’s work on the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns to an extended talk on the dangers of Mexican immigrants. Hunter’s 8:30 AM speaking slot – well before most Romney-bussed, hung-over college Republicans were even dragging themselves towards to toilet to purge themselves of last night’s Bacardi Light binge – spoke to his low standing within the Republican presidential field. At least the Congressman knows it, saying “The best guy doesn’t always win, but the best principles prevail in the end.”* Hunter recognizes that the greatest impact he can have in this campaign is to make immigration a major issue in the Republican primary.

That said, he made good faith attempts to project the viability of his campaign, noting his strong performances in the Maricopa County (AZ) and Spartanburg (SC) straw polls and spent lots of time waxing poetic about the virtue of fences, fences on top of fences and fences surrounding roads. Somewhere in there I’m pretty sure Hunter praised robots. Lastly, Hunter bizarrely touted running television ads in New Hampshire and South Carolina — his campaign is suspected of illegally using funds from his political action committee to pay for the presidential ads.

Mike Huckabee
Huckabee’s entrance into CPAC’s main ballroom was a fairly close mirror to what his current levels of support where: a subdued ovation equaled his second tier status with a potential to rise. Huckabee tried to win the crowd over through humor and candor, labeling this conference more appropriately the “Conservative Presidential Anxiety Conference,” where Republican base voters can be found asking, “Dude, where’s my candidate?”

The dissatisfaction and uncertainty that Huckabee spent much of his speech subtly reminding the audience was that there is no traditional Republican candidate heading the field. The Republican Party’s top-tier, according to conventional wisdom, is populated by a social moderate (Rudy Giuliani), a perceived social moderate (John McCain), and a former social moderate (Mitt Romney). Huckabee’s campaign prospects depend on conservative base voters rejecting these three many and searching hard for an alternative.

Huckabee reached out to these people during his speech by talking about his standing as a fiscal conservative and his positioning on abortion, religion, education, immigration and gay rights.

Huckabee’s talk on the conservative culture of life sought to tie the war on terror in with abortion. “This country is strong because it is a culture of life. What separates us from the Islamics is that we are a culture of life.” Huckabee illustrated this point by comparing the support within some portions of the radical Islamic community of suicide bombings and the American response Sago Mine disaster. Apparently because so many millions of Americans watched that tragedy and eventual failure to rescue all but one of the minters trapped in side, we have a culture of life that should be compared to radical Islamists.

Perhaps a more fitting analogy to some Muslims praising and supporting suicide bombings would be to Republican war bloggers who celebrated the destruction of Iraq (back when we were winning the war) and have called for the use of tactical nuclear weapons and massive aerial bombardments of Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations. Both represent tiny, depraved subsets of the larger communities to which they belong; neither should be generalized into representations of all of America nor all of the Muslim world. Unfortunately, Huckabee did that and painted the Muslim faith as one that does not support a culture of life.

But Huckabee doesn’t stop his fear-mongering there.

“There can be no negotiation with radical Islamic fascists…They are not interested in detente, they are not interested in some type of peaceful coexistence. They are solely interested in…our absolute annihilation and destruction.” Huckabee made a strong play towards this audiences’ fear that Al Qaeda will completely wipe out every American life and destroy this country. What he never discusses is how people holed up in caves in Pakistan and Afghanistan or bombed-out neighborhoods in Iraq are going to turn their hatred of us into an existential threat to the United States of America. All he does is recognize that some people hate us and would want to do what they have thus far been unable to do.

Huckabee spent far more time talking about Islamic terrorists than I expected, far more than he did talking about traditional Christian values issues (abortion, gay rights, stem cell research). The clear implication is that Huckabee does not think that the moral values voters of 2004 still exist as a bloc within the Republican base that needs to be mobilized for victory. This bloc has been converted into voters who cast their lot based on their griping fear that their life and this country will be suddenly extinguished by bearded imams from Afghanistan and Iran.

Huckabee left to a much louder ovation than the one he was greeted with. I guess playing to conservatives’ fears worked well for him. Expect fawning praise of his seriousness to come from right wing bloggers shortly…

*All quotes included in this post is based on live transcription. I cannot assert they are 100% accurate.
Cross posted at The Huffington Post.

CPAC, Duncan Hunter, Mike Huckabee | 1 Comment »

I’m in Washington DC this weekend covering the Conservative Political Action Conference. CPAC is the largest gathering of the Republican base, with over six thousand people expected to attend this weekend and major media and political figures from Dick Cheney and Mitch McConnell to Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity. Additionally, a large portion of the Republican presidential field will be speaking at CPAC today and tomorrow.
My content will be going up as frequently as possible at The Right’s Field and I will also be posting important news updates and broader commentary at the Huffington Post.

In terms of what’s already happened at CPAC, Erick Erickson of Red State has been posting a tremendous amount of content on almost every speech and panel of interest. Of note is Jim DeMint’s keynote speech, who Erickson identifies as “the voice of the conservative movement in the U.S. Senate.” Erickson also reports scuttlebutt of a movement to draft Mike Pence and claims that former New York Democratic governor Mario Cuomo would endorse New Gingrich for president, which sounds about as likely as former Speaker Newt Gingrich endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. Lastly in my summary of Erick Erickson’s coverage of CPAC is his reporting that only four of 168 Republican National Committeemen are in attendance at CPAC. Erickson finds this baffling, “The heart and soul of the Republican party is conservative. The party leadership would do best to remember that and should be encouraged to come to CPAC and participate.”

One thing to watch out for will be the results from the CPAC straw poll.

Technorati Tags: Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, CPAC 2007, Erick Erickson, Mike Pence, Newt Gingrich, Jim DeMint

CPAC | 4 Comments »

Hemorrhaging support because of right-wing antagonism to Mormonism and because of his quick slide to the far-right the Romney campaign is busing people into CPAC on Thursday in order to stuff CPAC’s straw poll.

The straw poll at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference beginning here Thursday has never played a pivotal role in a Republican presidential primary. But the Mitt Romney campaign nonetheless is paying for three vans, scores of registration fees and at least a half-dozen hotel rooms to pack collegiate supporters into the event.

…

All the campaigns encourage their supporters to turn out for the conference and other straw polls. But organizers of the conservative political action conference said reports from students indicated that Mr. Romney’s was the only campaign providing transportation or hotel rooms. The campaign has provided small buses or vans for students from Michigan and Boston, two strongholds of support for Mr. Romney.

The young cons are apparently willing to support whomever pays their bus trip out to DC for CPAC.

“I would expect Romney will do pretty well in the straw poll because his campaign is the one we are seeing investing so much money and energy into it,” Mr. Hall, who said he was not affiliated with any primary campaign, wrote in an e-mail message. “The response we’ve seen from students in Michigan is that regardless of who they are supporting for president, they are more than willing to take a free trip to the conference if all they have to do in return is wear a shirt and vote for him in a straw poll.”

As I’m sure most readers suspect, this tactic has been tried before and helped launch the careers of such conservative stalwarts as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, George Allen, Gary Bauer.

Organizers of the annual conservative conference said that another concerted effort to get student supporters to the event was organized in early 2000 by Gary Bauer, a Christian conservative candidate for the Republican nomination. Mr. Bauer said in an interview that he had organized the effort to help prove he was a viable candidate and considered his strong showing a success. But he dropped out early in the primaries nonetheless.

Will Romney even make it to the early primaries? Even Chuck Todd thinks Romney’s in trouble. For the record, we started the Romney Campaign death watch on December 22nd.
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CPAC, Mitt Romney | 11 Comments »