Wednesday, May 2, 2001 8:00 AM UTC2001-05-02T08:00:00Zl, M j, Y g:i A T
Young Lions, Part 2
Uma Thurman reads from David Ebershoff's novel "A Danish Girl," and Ethan Hawke reads from Heidi Julavits' "The Mineral Palace," two finalist in the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award.
The New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award is a new $10,000 prize to be given each spring to an American author age 35 or younger for a novel or short story collection. Young Lions committee members Rick Moody, Ethan Hawke and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh spearheaded the creation of the award.
The six nominees for the 2001 Young Lions Fiction Award were:
Mark Z. Danielewski (“House of Leaves”)
David Ebershoff (“The Danish Girl”)
Myla Goldberg (“Bee Season”)
Heidi Julavits (“The Mineral Palace”)
Akhil Sharma (“An Obedient Father”)
Darin Strauss (“Chang and Eng”)
At the April 23 awards ceremony, actors Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman read from the nominated works. The award judges were novelists Michael Chabon, A. M. Homes and Colm Tsibmn.
Listen to Uma Thurman read from “The Danish Girl” by David Ebershoff and to Ethan Hawke read from “The Mineral Palace” by Heidi Julavits.
In my report on the Conservative Political Action conference in Washington I wrote that the Occupiers and the CPAC crowd “barely know how to talk to each other.”
But they’re trying.
My colleague Eddie Becker was there when it happened at CPAC this weekend. A couple of Tea Party militiamen understood that if you buy a few cold ones and start talking, you may discover you have some things in common (along with some huge differences). There have been other friendly encounters of these two movements. In Richmond Virginia for example.
This video is 15 minutes long. Its worth the wait to see Occupiers and Tea Partiers trying to get to the heart of the problem.
In seventh grade I owned the cassette tape of “Whitney,” the second album by Whitney Houston, which was true of pretty much every 12-year-old female in America. I played the hell out of that tape. I used to spend afternoons in my bedroom, lip-syncing those songs to my bedroom wall, because that’s the kind of kid I was. Always longing for an imaginary audience. I did not want to be a writer back then, or the president of the United States. I wanted to be a pop star. And in 1987, there wasn’t any pop star more elegant or talented than Whitney Houston. Daughter of a gospel singer, niece of a R&B legend, smashingly beautiful — she was practically anointed by the gods for greatness.
The song I loved the most on that tape was “Didn’t We Almost Have it All.” Fourth song, first side. I would perform the song to the wall, then rewind it and perform it again. Play, rewind, repeat. I can still hear the squiggle of the tape in my head as I pressed on the jam-box button just long enough to find the song’s opening once more. This is a lost art in the age of the iPod, but back then, knowing how many seconds to rewind a cassette was a sign you truly understood its rhythms. You had literally learned the music backwards and forwards.
“This again?” my brother would ask as the tinkling synthesizers kicked in. My brother was a metalhead, who loved the righteous anger of AC/DC and Judas Priest and did not give a rip for the likes of Whitney Houston.
He did not get a choice in the matter. Here is how the song begins:
Remember when we held on the rain, the nights we almost lost it?
Once again, we can take the night into tomorrow
Living on feelings, touching you I feel it all again
It’s a bit mundane, frankly. It’s a fill-in-the-blank tale of a broken relationship. Funny how every love story sounds the same but feels so different when you’re inside it. That’s the poignancy of love stories, I guess. You’re never alone. Then again: You’re never unique.
But this song is all about the chorus. It is a song constructed almost entirely of its irresistible chorus — half a dozen times in less than five minutes — and the chorus launches a mere 45 seconds in. No foreplay, no footsie under the table, no lingering glances and sighs. This song grabs you by the collar and sticks its tongue down your throat.
It’s a really fantastic chorus, by the way. It’s OK to sing along:
Didn’t we almost have it all, when love was all we had worth giving?
The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend. Loving you makes life worth living.
At 12 years old, I had never been in love. I had never even kissed anyone. And so it’s peculiar that I experienced this song so powerfully. The agony. The crashing emotion. The ka-pow of it all. Why did I feel it so intensely? What was it teaching me? I wonder if all these songs of woe and regret didn’t warp my sense of romance. I wanted to grow up and fall in love, but more to the point: I wanted to grow up and lose that love, because that’s when the real drama began. I understood, even then, the delicious pain of being broken-hearted.
The chorus returns, a little different this time:
Didn’t we almost have it all, the nights we held on till the morning?
You know we’ll never love that way again. Didn’t we almost have it all?
This song climaxes so quickly. Not even a minute into it, and we’re already basking in Whitney’s vibrato, the glorious burst of sustained sound that would become her signature. The woman could push a note like nobody else, squeeze it and feel it up till the listener wanted to cry for mercy. But when you peak this early, it’s hard to know where to go next. The excitement is unsustainable, and for the next three minutes the song will throw out its back trying to one-up itself — a series of elevated key changes, strings atop swell. The song wants you to know the singer is bleeding.
For the moment, though, it pulls back. Whitney’s voice grows subdued. We get more of the back story which, naturally, is like every back story we’ve ever heard.
The way you used to touch me felt so fine
Kept our hearts together, down the line
A moment in the soul can last forever, comfort and keep us
Help me bring the feeling back again.
I can understand why people hate Whitney Houston. I mean, these lyrics are dreck. It’s cooler to love the big, dirty riffs of Van Halen, the gritty excess of Guns N Roses. But I still find the stadium ballads of the mid-1980s strangely moving. The REO Speedwagon, the Air Supply, the Chicago, the Bryan Adams. The cheesy, lighter-held-aloft songs. They are not clever. They are not sly. They have the temerity to be earnest and unblinking, nothing but a desperate plea to be loved. Like a boyfriend who dims the lights and scatters rose petals in the bathtub. Please, baby, come back to me.
Or, as Whitney Houston sings it:
Didn’t we almost have it all? When love was all we had worth giving?
The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend. Loving you makes life worth living
I finally did fall in love in my sophomore year. He was sweet like my father, charming like my older brother. I still adore him. We drove around in his Chevy Nova listening to David Bowie and Elvis Costello. I began to understand that Whitney Houston was bad and not to be encouraged. We made fun of “I Will Always Love You,” the No. 1 song that would not go away in 1992, the year we graduated. We wanted to stab that song with knives; we wanted to punish it somehow. We were not the only ones turning on Whitney. That was the year Nirvana hit. Culture was edging away from the light and toward the dark, and there was Whitney in the video for “I Will Always Love You,” singing her heart out in the middle of an empty winter landscape as Kevin Costner walked away.
My boyfriend and I broke up at the end of high school, and I secretly bought the cassingle to “I Will Always Love You.” I listened to it in my bedroom, over and over. Nothing could touch the pure emotion of that song. I listened to “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” too, and it was exactly the comfort I wanted, like pulling an old teddy bear off the shelf and cradling it in your arms as you cried.
Didn’t we almost have it all? The nights we held on to the morning?
You know you’ll never love that way again. Didn’t we almost have it all?
“Didn’t We Almost Have It All” is a good breakup song because it grows temperamental. It’s not just a lament. It’s a bit of a tantrum. It’s all so unfair, Whitney is telling us. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. We had it all, and then we did not. How could that possibly happen?
And I like this part, the growl in Whitney’s voice, like she is stomping her foot.
Didn’t we have the best of times, when love was young and new?
Couldn’t we reach inside to find the world of me and you?
We’ll never lose it again. Cause once you know what love is, you’ll never let it end.
After college, I stopped paying attention to Whitney Houston. I guess a lot of people did. There was a reality show, and crack, and debasement that defied easy explanation. It was easy to shove it off on Bobby Brown — the controlling spouse, the bad influence — but she was the one who stayed with him. The reality show made her seem coarse and a little bit mean. When she told Diane Sawyer that “crack is wack,” it was like she was participating in her own satire. This was unanticipated. Crack addicts were not supposed to look like Whitney Houston.
The thing is, I’ve met other crack addicts since then, and they don’t look the part either. That might be the one characteristic they have in common, other than an addiction to smoking crack. I never did drugs; I was a boozehound, a pure-bred lush. But I understand that you have to keep pushing to get the same feeling. You level out, and so you need more. You level out again, and you need more again. Play, rewind, repeat. It’s not just the crack or the booze that destroys people. It’s the always needing more.
I once heard drug addiction described as nostalgia. Chasing the perfection and the abandon of that first time.
Didn’t we almost have it all? The nights we held on to the morning.
You know you’ll never love that way again.
I was reading a book about Marilyn Monroe when I heard that Whitney Houston had died at the age of 48. Monroe’s is the ur-diva downfall, and these tragedies have elements in common: Drugs, a questionable taste in men, the inability to live up to a public persona, success like a rocketship. And they had beauty, of course. Uncommon, breathtaking beauty.
Earlier that afternoon, I had been taking a walk with a friend. I am 37, she is a little older, perhaps 39. We were talking about how hard it is for gorgeous women to age, because they get too accustomed to the oxygen of male desire. One of the good things about never being the best-looking woman in the room is that you never have to stop being the best-looking woman in the room. It is a dangerous game to base your meaning and self-worth on other people’s admiration, because it will inevitably recede, and I don’t think anyone would understand that better than Whitney Houston. It must be agonizing to hold the world’s attention in your palm, and then to feel it slowly drain away.
Didn’t we almost have it all?
After I learned about Whitney Houston’s death, I went searching for this song on YouTube. It is such a corny song, I know, but it made my heart pound nonetheless. I love it completely, without reason, the way you feel about a high school sweetheart, the way you feel about a drug, the way you feel about a song you loved when you were dumb and splendid and 12 years old.
I listen to songs over and over again. I have always been like this. I asked my mother, who is a therapist, why I did this, and she said maybe I was trying to unlock a song’s mystery, to master it in some way.
And I do notice different things every time I hear this song. I notice a quiver in the voice, a breath, a pause. I notice how the song ends by asking the same question twice, different each time. First it is defiant. Then it is sad and vulnerable.
Didn’t we almost have it all? the song asks. And I don’t know the answer to this question. So I press repeat, and listen to it once more.
In late December, the lot was just a big blank: a few burgundy metal shipping containers sitting in an expanse of crushed eggshell-colored gravel inside a razor-wire-topped fence. The American military in Afghanistan doesn’t want to talk about it, but one day soon, it will be a new hub for the American drone war in the Greater Middle East.
Next year, that empty lot will be a two-story concrete intelligence facility for America’s drone war, brightly lit and filled with powerful computers kept in climate-controlled comfort in a country where most of the population has no access to electricity. It will boast almost 7,000 square feet of offices, briefing and conference rooms, and a large “processing, exploitation and dissemination” operations center — and, of course, it will be built with American tax dollars.
Nor is it an anomaly. Despite all the talk of drawdowns and withdrawals, there has been a years-long building boom in Afghanistan that shows little sign of abating. In early 2010, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had nearly 400 bases in Afghanistan. Today, Lieutenant Lauren Rago of ISAF public affairs tells TomDispatch, the number tops 450.
The hush-hush, high-tech, super-secure facility at the massive air base in Kandahar is just one of many building projects the U.S. military currently has planned or underway in Afghanistan. While some U.S. bases are indeed closing up shop or being transferred to the Afghan government, and there’s talk of combat operations slowing or ending next year, as well as a withdrawal of American combat forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the U.S. military is still preparing for a much longer haul at mega-bases like Kandahar and Bagram airfields. The same is true even of some smaller camps, forward operating bases (FOBs) and combat outposts (COPs) scattered through the country’s backlands. “Bagram is going through a significant transition during the next year to two years,” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Gerdes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Bagram Office recently told Freedom Builder, a Corps of Engineers publication. “We’re transitioning… into a long-term, five-year, 10-year vision for the base.”
Whether the U.S. military will still be in Afghanistan in five or 10 years remains to be seen, but steps are currently being taken to make that possible. U.S. military publications, plans and schematics, contracting documents and other official data examined by TomDispatch catalog hundreds of construction projects worth billions of dollars slated to begin, continue or conclude in 2012.
While many of these efforts are geared toward structures for Afghan forces or civilian institutions, a considerable number involve U.S. facilities, some of the most significant being dedicated to the ascendant forms of American warfare: drone operations and missions by elite special operations units. The available plans for most of these projects suggest durability. “The structures that are going in are concrete and mortar, rather than plywood and tent skins,” says Gerdes. As of last December, his office was involved in 30 Afghan construction projects for U.S. or international coalition partners worth almost $427 million.
The Big Base Build-Up
Recently, the New York Times reported that President Obama is likely to approve a plan to shift much of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan to special operations forces. These elite troops would then conduct kill/capture missions and train local troops well beyond 2014. Recent building efforts in the country bear this out.
A major project at Bagram Air Base, for instance, involves the construction of a special operations forces complex, a clandestine base within a base that will afford America’s black ops troops secrecy and near-absolute autonomy from other U.S. and coalition forces. Begun in 2010, the $29 million project is slated to be completed this May and join roughly 90 locations around the country where troops from Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan have been stationed.
Elsewhere on Bagram, tens of millions of dollars are being spent on projects that are less sexy but no less integral to the war effort, like paving dirt roads and upgrading drainage systems on the mega-base. In January, the U.S. military awarded a $7 million contract to a Turkish construction company to build a 24,000-square-foot command-and-control facility. Plans are also in the works for a new operations center to support tactical fighter jet missions, a new flight-line fire station, as well as more lighting and other improvements to support the American air war.
Last month, Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered that the U.S.-run prison at Bagram be transferred to Afghan control. By the end of January, the U.S. had issued a $36 million contract for the construction, within a year, of a new prison on the base. While details are sparse, plans for the detention center indicate a thoroughly modern, high-security facility complete with guard towers, advanced surveillance systems, administrative facilities and the capacity to house about 2,000 prisoners.
At Kandahar Air Field, that new intelligence facility for the drone war will be joined by a similarly-sized structure devoted to administrative operations and maintenance tasks associated with robotic aerial missions. It will be able to accommodate as many as 180 personnel at a time. With an estimated combined price tag of up to $5 million, both buildings will be integral to Air Force and possibly CIA operations involving both the MQ-1 Predator drone and its more advanced and more heavily-armed progeny, the MQ-9 Reaper.
The military is keeping information about these drone facilities under extraordinarily tight wraps. They refused to answer questions about whether, for instance, the construction of these new centers for robotic warfare are in any way related to the loss of Shamsi Air Base in neighboring Pakistan as a drone operations center, or if they signal efforts to increase the tempo of drone missions in the years ahead. The International Joint Command’s chief of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) operations, aware that such questions were to be posed, backed out of a planned interview with TomDispatch.
“Unfortunately our ISR chief here in the International Joint Command is going to be unable to address your questions,” Lieutenant Ryan Welsh of ISAF Joint Command Media Outreach explained by email just days before the scheduled interview. He also made it clear that any question involving drone operations in Pakistan was off limits. “The issues that you raise are outside the scope under which the IJC operates, therefore we are unable to facilitate this interview request.”
Whether the construction at Kandahar is designed to free up facilities elsewhere for CIA drone operations across the border in Pakistan or is related only to missions within Afghanistan, it strongly suggests a ramping up of unmanned operations. It is, however, just one facet of the ongoing construction at the air field. This month, a $26 million project to build 11 new structures devoted to tactical vehicle maintenance at Kandahar is scheduled for completion. With two large buildings for upkeep and repairs, one devoted strictly to fixing tires, another to painting vehicles, as well as an industrial-sized car wash, and administrative and storage facilities, the big base’s building boom shows no sign of flickering out.
Construction and Reconstruction
This year, at Herat Air Base in the province of the same name bordering Turkmenistan and Iran, the U.S. is slated to begin a multimillion-dollar project to enhance its special forces’ air operations. Plans are in the works to expand apron space — where aircraft can be parked, serviced and loaded or unloaded — for helicopters and airplanes, as well as to build new taxiways and aircraft shelters.
That project is just one of nearly 130, cumulatively valued at about $1.5 billion, slated to be carried out in Herat, Helmand and Kandahar provinces this year, according to Army Corps of Engineers documents examined by TomDispatch. These also include efforts at Camp Tombstone and Camp Dwyer, both in Helmand Province as well as Kandahar’s FOB Hadrian and FOB Wilson. The U.S. military also recently awarded a contract for more air field apron space at a base in Kunduz, a new secure entrance and new roads for FOB Delaram II, and new utilities and roads at FOB Shank, while the Marines recently built a new chapel at Camp Bastion.
Seven years ago, Forward Operating Base Sweeney, located a mile up in a mountain range in Zabul Province, was a well-outfitted, if remote, American base. After U.S. troops abandoned it, however, the base fell into disrepair. Last month, American troops returned in force and began rebuilding the outpost, constructing everything from new troop housing to a new storage facility. “We built a lot of buildings, we put up a lot of tents, we filled a lot of sandbags, and we increased our force protection significantly,” Captain Joe Mickley, commanding officer of the soldiers taking up residence at the base, told a military reporter.
Decommission and Deconstruction
Hesco barriers are, in essence, big bags of dirt. Up to seven feet tall, made of canvas and heavy gauge wire mesh, they form protective walls around U.S. outposts all over Afghanistan. They’ll take the worst of sniper rounds, rifle-propelled grenades, even mortar shells, but one thing can absolutely wreck them — the Marines’ 9th Engineer Support Battalion.
At the beginning of December, the 9th Engineers were building bases and filling up Hescos in Helmand Province. By the end of the month, they were tearing others down.
Wielding pickaxes, shovels, bolt-cutters, powerful rescue saws and front-end loaders, they have begun “demilitarizing” bases, cutting countless Hescos — which cost $700 or more a pop — into heaps of jagged scrap metal and bulldozing berms in advance of the announced American withdrawal from Afghanistan. At Firebase Saenz, for example, Marines were bathed in a sea of crimson sparks as they sawed their way through the metal mesh and let the dirt spill out, leaving a country already haunted by the ghosts of British and Russian bases with yet another defunct foreign outpost. After Saenz, it was on to another patrol base slated for destruction.
Not all rural outposts are being torn down, however. Some are being handed over to the Afghan Army or police. And new facilities are now being built for the indigenous forces at an increasing rate. “If current projections remain accurate, we will award 18 contracts in February,” Bonnie Perry, the head of contracting for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Afghanistan Engineering District-South, told military reporter Karla Marshall. “Next quarter we expect that awards will remain high, with the largest number of contract awards occurring in May.” One of the projects underway is a large base near Herat, which will include barracks, dining facilities, office space and other amenities for Afghan commandos.
Tell Me How This Ends
No one should be surprised that the U.S. military is building up and tearing down bases at the same time, nor that much of the new construction is going on at mega-bases, while small outposts in the countryside are being abandoned. This is exactly what you would expect of an occupation force looking to scale back its “footprint” and end major combat operations while maintaining an on-going presence in Afghanistan. Given the U.S. military’s projected retreat to its giant bases and an increased reliance on kill/capture black-ops as well as unmanned air missions, it’s also no surprise that its signature projects for 2012 include a new special operations forces compound, clandestine drone facilities and a brand new military prison.
There’s little doubt Bagram Air Base will exist in five or 10 years. Just who will be occupying it is, however, less clear. After all, in Iraq, the Obama administration negotiated for some way to station a significant military force — 10,000 or more troops — there beyond a withdrawal date that had been set in stone for years. While a token number of U.S. troops and a highly militarized State Department contingent remain there, the Iraqi government largely thwarted the American efforts — and now, even the State Department presence is being halved.
It’s less likely this will be the case in Afghanistan, but it remains possible. Still, it’s clear that the military is building in that country as if an enduring American presence were a given. Whatever the outcome, vestiges of the current base-building boom will endure and become part of America’s Afghan legacy.
On Bagram’s grounds stands a distinctive structurecalled the “Crow’s Nest.” It’s an old control tower built by the Soviets to coordinate their military operations in Afghanistan. That foreign force left the country in 1989. The Soviet Union itself departed from the planet less than three years later. The tower remains.
America’s new prison in Bagram will undoubtedly remain, too. Just who the jailers will be and who will be locked inside five years or 10 years from now is, of course, unknown. But given the history — marked by torture and deaths — of the appalling treatment of inmates at Bagram and, more generally, of the brutality toward prisoners by all parties to the conflict over the years, in no scenario are the results likely to be pretty.
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Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch.
This story is a joint investigative project of Salon, AlterNet, and Brave New Foundation. More Nick Turse
On Friday evening, conservatives and Occupy forces talked trash outside the Conservative Political Action Committee conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C. To my right stood two Occupy soldiers, Michael and Mo, both African-American, shouting slogans about the 1 percent. To my left, a cluster of jacket-and-tied CPAC men shouted sound bytes about freedom In between them stood a line of grim-looking, blue-suited officers of the Metropolitan Police Department, both white and African-American, quite possibly thinking, These people are nuts.
Both sides came equipped for a war of words. Michael is a young Iraq war vet from Alaska who once admired George W. Bush, and is now an Occupier par excellence. He offered the high-decibel insight that “The system has failed!” Standing next to him, Mo, a big guy and a regular at the now-evicted OccupyDC camp, shouted “The 1 percent are using you guys.”
“The 1 percent?” a CPAC man volleyed back. “God bless ‘em. What’s wrong with making money?”
Another CPAC-er tossed this verbal firecracker: “Just because you’ve failed, doesn’t mean the system’s failed.”
That was rich, the Occupiers thought. Michael had done a tour of duty in Iraq — probably one more than the CPAC man had done. Mo was personally offended. “I haven’t failed,” he said, his face crinkling up at the insulting assumption. “I have a job.” He shook his head and turned away like: There’s no talking to these people. And the CPAC gang turned away, no doubt thinking: There’s no talking to these people.
The CPAC cluster hungrily took up the chant of “Steak! Steak! Steak!” Occupiers replied with a mocking chant of “White power! White power! White power!” And so the confrontation dissolved.
“Truth on our side”
But inside the big hotel, there was no such failure of communication. Several thousand energized, if anxious, conservative activists launched themselves into the 2012 presidential campaign with a display of divisions — but also an unmistakable resolve to end the presidency of Barack Obama by any legal means necessary. Their mood was upbeat, and barely shaken by the falling unemployment rate and the president’s recent uptick in the polls.
“You ever notice how liberals always have a scowl on their face?” asked Jim Jordan, a Tea Party congressman from Ohio. A four-time high-school wrestling champion, Jordan did not look like a 1 percent type of guy. He spoke from the podium without a jacket. He was all big ears and muscles to go with his five o’clock shadow and yellow tie. “Conservatives are more positive because we’ve got truth on our side,” he said with a smile.
But here’s the truth: the assembled activists were having a devil of time trying to figure out who should lead their cause against Obama, the mild-mannered former law professor whom these people tend to regard as a tyrant. On the first day of the conference, my sense was that a plurality favored former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum for president. Almost as many touted Mitt Romney as the most electable candidate; Newt Gingrich partisans were harder to come by. (The Ron Paul campaign decamped to the Maine caucuses, which Romney won Saturday in a squeaker.)
In a panel discussion in the main ballroom, respected conservative elders spoke frankly. “How many of you out there have mocked President Obama’s call for hope and change with a friend or in your group,” ask pollster Scott Rasmussen. “Come on, how many of you have done that?”
A lot of hands went up.
“Well, that’s stupid,” he barked. “In the last three elections, people have voted against the party in power; voters are looking for hope and change in 2012 as much as in 2008. You ought to be encouraging Republican candidates to offer that positive step forward.”
This was a crowd unified by the incantation of Ronald Reagan’s name and an inexhaustible fondness for Obama teleprompter jokes. They overwhelmingly favor cutting government spending, oppose any kind of taxation, reject abortion and, I get the impression, favor limiting the availability of birth control.
They are most divided on the issue of illegal immigration. The one moment of true anger I saw during the conference came during an immigration panel discussion when a libertarian speaker asserted that undocumented immigrants were as law-abiding and hard-working as Americans. There was booing, and someone in the crowd shouted, “That’s bullshit!”
One of the panel speakers was Robert Vandervoort, the executive director of a group called Pro-English. As Salon reported last week, Vandervoort was one of three invited CPAC speakers with a history of white supremacist activities. He restricted his remarks to the cause of making English the official language of the United States.
A third speaker on the panel was Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, an adviser to the Romney campaign and the author of anti-illegal immigrant laws recently enacted in Arizona, Alabama and South Carolina. Kobach told me afterwards that he “abhorred racism.” Just because he appeared on a panel with Vandervoort, he said, didn’t mean that he shared his views.
When it came to immigration policy, Kobach said he had no problem with Romney’s oft-derided use of the term “self-deportation.” He said that Romney, if elected president, would pursue a policy of “attrition through enforcement” that would make life so unpleasant for the undocumented and their families that they would voluntarily leave. Kobach said he was not satisfied with the Obama administration’s deportation policy that has removed a million people from the United States in three years. A “sensible” immigration policy, he said, could reduce the resident population of 11 million undocumented immigrants in American by 50 percent by 2016.
A pledge to forcibly remove 5.5 million people, most of them Latino, from their homes may not be the most attractive election-year message for the fastest growing demographic group in the American electorate, but it seems that is now the Republican frontrunner’s declared position.
When Brad Bailey of Nassau Bay, Texas, overheard Kobach’s recommendation, he scoffed “That guy never met a payroll.” Bailey is one of those pro-immigration Republicans whose views are heard less often these days. He says he has employed dozens of immigrants at his two seafood restaurants over the last 25 years and regards them as hard-working and God-fearing people. Of the undocumented workers in America, he said. “They’re not going home. America is their home.” Bailey says the anti-illegal immigration groups should not be trusted because they are in cahoots with Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club.
But, for all these hints of nativism, I did not discern an obvious racial animus among many attendees. “Is this a racist crowd?” I asked African American talk radio host Pudgy Miller. “No,” he said. I put the same question to Kevin Daniels, who runs a black Christian conservative group called the Frederick Douglass Foundation in North Carolina. His left eyebrow rose about a millimeter, and he shrugged. “I just don’t see it.” (I was going to write that Daniels was positively Obama-ian in his self-control, but he might not take it as a compliment.)
The bottom line is that the willingness of CPAC leaders to invite the likes of Vandervoort indicates a tolerance for racist discourse. And Daniels’ reading of American politics (“liberal government as the new slavery”) strikes me as a profound misreading of African-American history. But when I saw the crowd cheering Herman Cain as he proclaimed yet again the virtues of his budget-busting 9-9-9 plan, it seemed to me that “racist” is not a useful term for describing the CPAC rank and file.
“Severely conservative”
Perhaps hottest topic of conversation was the Obama administration’s decision last week to require that birth control be part of the basic coverage provided by any health insurer under the Affordable Care Act. When they spoke at CPAC on Friday, all three of the leading presidential candidates denounced the decision as an attack on the religious liberty of Catholic institutions that have non-Catholic employees. All pledged to repeal the national health insurance scheme they call “Obama-care.”
The most revealing remarks came in the candidates’ respective pitches to the assembled. When Santorum asked, “Why would an undecided voter vote for a candidate who the party is not excited about?” he said what a lot of people in the room were thinking.
“I’m the only candidate who has never worked in Washington,” Romney boasted two hours later. In promising to be “severely conservative,” he drew repeated applause and refuted the cruel observation of National Review’s Jonah Goldberg: “A Romney speech is like Mr. Spock reading a love letter.” At CPAC, Romney sounded more like Captain Kirk reading a love letter.
Later in the day, Newt Gingrich arranged to be introduced by his overly enthusiastic wife Callista — a big mistake in this venue. “Home wrecker,” hissed more than one woman in the crowd as Gingrich’s well-coiffed mistress-turned-wife sung the praises of the man she hopes to propel to the Oval Office by sheer force of hairdo. Her husband honked out his pitch that he would be the “paycheck president” who could beat the “food stamp president.” He drew some cheers, but a serial adulterer was not going to wow this straight-laced crowd.
Deep in the hotel’s hospitality suites, Santorum mobilized what might be called the Republican counter-establishment. These are the evangelical and Tea Party leaders who are struggling for control of the Republican party with its traditional moneyed elite, now led by the likes of Karl Rove and Roger Ailes of Fox News (who arguably embody the power of the 1 percent more than the CPAC crowd).
The candidate huddled with conservative movement leaders at a private luncheon hosted by ConservativeHQ.com chairman Richard Viguerie, according to the Wall Street Journal. Viguerie, a prolific fund-raiser and one of the founding fathers of the American right:
…set the tone of the meeting by reminding the attendees that, based on who had won what in the Republican primaries so far, one of four people was going to be president after November 2012: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum, and that of the four, Rick Santorum was the one reliable conservative left in the race.
By the end of the three-day conference, Santorum’s supporters dominated the hotel lobby where the partisans of the various candidate handed out signs and talked up their heroes. Becky Barker, a 20-year-old college student from Gaithersburg, Md., who hopes to become a historian and stay-at-home mother, told me she was excited about the prospect of working on a Santorum campaign in the fall, mostly because of his pro-life views. “If it comes down to Romney,” she allowed, “I’ll hold my nose and vote for him.”
“Santorum is not a reluctant conservative,” said Tim LeFever, a real estate broker and evangelical leader active in campaigns against gay rights in California. “Ideally we would combine his strength with the infrastructure of Romney with the debating ability of Newt.”
This was defensive crowd, touchy about the slights of the “lamestream media” and irked by the Occupy movement’s claim that they are somehow part of the 1 percent. When I asked Rusty Humphries, a popular talk-radio host from Atlanta, what he thought the conservative movement’s biggest problem was going into 2012, he shook his head, “Our image. They’re doing a very good job with that 1 percent thing. It’s all lies but it works.”
In his podium appearance, Andrew Breitbart, the movement’s brash, factually challenged guerrilla videographer, said he wasn’t worried by the lack of agreement on the best presidential candidate. “Ask not what you can do for your candidate,” he shouted. “Ask what you can do for your candidate. That’s the Tea Party.”
Breitbart went on to tell a funny story about having dinner with former radical activist Bill Ayres (“He’s an excellent cook”) which mutated into a less-than-convincing conspiracy theory about how the real purpose of the anti-Vietnam War movement was to deliver Barack Obama (then an 8-year-old living with his mother in Indonesia) into the White House where he could betray America and steal your money. It was more entertaining than persuasive.
“Put them in plastic bags”
The conference closed on a more substantive note Saturday afternoon when Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader and conservative movement’s most influential strategist, took the stage. More than any other person, Norquist is responsible for the no-tax orthodoxy of today’s Republican party. Looking and sounding like a football coach offering a pep talk to his team before a big game, Norquist mixed unabashed confidence with realistic talk about the difficulties of achieving victory. He used both data and violent imagery to rally his team against what he called the “coercive utopians” of the Obama administration.
Norquist boasted that only five of the 50 states raised taxes in 2011, and he talked tough about how to deal with those who oppose the conservative agenda. “As for the trial lawyers,” he said, “let’s put them in plastic bags and take them down to the river.”
That unfunny remark crystallized a thought I’d had for three days. If the CPAC army is strong on authentic conviction, they are weak on democratic self-awareness. Based on what I saw and heard at CPAC, an undecided voter might conclude that American conservatives in 2012 oppose taxing the rich to reduce the deficit, seek to limit women’s access to birth control, promise to forcibly expel 5.5 million mostly law-abiding people from their homes, and are led by a man occasionally talks like Tony Soprano. Some Americans might be attracted to that package. But even some conservatives will pause. And the center? It’s not just liberals who may be put off by that agenda.
But none could doubt the movement’s swagger when Norquist fine-tuned his newest talking point about Mitt Romney. He predicted that the leadership of the conservative movement for the next 20 years will emanate from Congress, not the White House (a likely development for which Democrats seem unprepared).
“We’re not auditioning for someone to tell us what to do,” he declared. “We know what to do. We just need a president who can sign the legislation that the Republican House and Senate pass. … We don’t need someone to think. … We need someone who knows how to hold a pen.”
Warming to the idea of Mitt Romney as their obedient servant, the CPAC crowd gave Norquist a standing ovation.
Then came the much-anticipated straw poll results. The crowd gasped when it was announced that Romney won 39 percent of the votes of 3,400-plus conference participants, edging Santorum (who had 31 percent) and leaving Gingrich far behind (20 percent). The Romney contingent cheered mightily while Santorum’s supporters brayed in dismay.
“Romney dodged a bullet,” Tony Katz, a Los Angeles talk-radio host with a stylish L.A. haircut, told me in the hotel bar afterwards. “If Santorum had won, he would have capped off an unbelievable week where he won three states he wasn’t expected to win, and he raised $3 million. If he won the straw poll, he would have had talking points until the Arizona debate [scheduled for February 22]. Now Romney has the talking points.”
There was one notable footnote buried in the poll data. While the straw poll of CPAC participants found 99 percent disapproval of Obama’s job performance, a national poll of self-identified conservatives conducted by CPAC last week found a remarkable 19 percent approve of the job President Obama is doing.
Is it really possible that one in five conservatives nationwide thinks Obama is doing an OK job as president? If that finding is not an outlier, the conservative highlights of the Obama’s presidency—the reliance on Wall Street executives, the faith in bipartisanship, the killing of Osama Bin Laden—may be winning him undetected support deep in enemy territory.
The conference closed with an address by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, now the spiritual den mother of the conservative movement. As she bleated her way through a predictable speech lamenting that President Obama transformed “the shining city on a hill” to a “sinking ship,” a group of college students stood up in the darkened ballroom and started shouting “mic check!” They were immediately drowned out by booing and a Palin-led chant of “USA! USA! USA!” As the security men hustled the kids out through the hotel’s marble lobby, they held up fists of solidarity while bystanders shouted “Loser!” and “Get a job!”
On the sidewalk outside, the group of 15 fresh-faced students from American University, Georgetown and other local colleges, resumed their mic check. Jacob Hope, a history and politics double major, read excerpts from the Occupy DC’s statement of principles calling for “a more democratic just and sustainable world.” Aiming his remarks at the people inside the hotel, he added, “Before you vilify, hear our declaration.”
The students’ mic check included the claim, “We have been captives of a corrupt economic and political system for far too long,” a sentiment voiced by many CPAC speakers. But what is the source of the corruption of American democracy? That is the question that divides America into its red and blue territories.
For the CPAC crowd, that corruption originates exclusively with secular liberals and anyone else who believes in governmental action for the common good. For the Occupiers, the corruption originates mainly with a dominant financial and political elite, now known as the “1 percent,” whom the CPAC crowd reveres, defends and aspires to join. These two movements barely know how to talk to each other but by the time the conference ended on Saturday night, it was clear their polar positions define the current political spectrum.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at a caucus, Saturday, Feb. 11, 2012, in Portland, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty) (Credit: AP)
The fact that Mitt Romney scored two straw poll victories over the weekend is not, by itself, bad news for his campaign. But the fact that the entire political world knows he did is.
If things were going the way Romney and his campaign wanted them to be going (and the way they believed they were going until about a week ago), the straw votes at CPAC and in Maine on Saturday would have been campaign footnotes, two more lay-ups for a candidate well on his way to uniting the Republican Party. Instead, they made for headline news, two desperately needed and somewhat surprising victories for a feeble front-runner.
When February started, the assumption was that Romney would win every primary and caucus scheduled for the month, a streak that would lift his standing in national polls to new and previously unimaginable heights and cement his image as the GOP’s inevitable nominee. Romney would then be positioned to finish off Newt Gingrich once and for all on Super Tuesday in early March, at which point it would finally be safe to pivot to the general election.
As expected, the first domino fell in Nevada two Saturdays ago, with Romney posting a lopsided victory, Gingrich barely staving off Ron Paul for second place, and Rick Santorum showing no hint of life. But then, out of nowhere, came Santorum’s stunning sweep last Tuesday – wins with 55 percent in Missouri, 45 percent in Minnesota and 40 percent in Colorado. And just like that, Romney had lost three of the first four February contests and gained a new and potentially more formidable chief rival in Santorum.
That made Saturday an unexpectedly pivotal day for Romney. Before Santorum’s rise from the dead, only two CPAC straw poll outcomes seemed plausible: (1) A Romney victory that would confirm his campaign’s superior organization, its success in marginalizing would-be conservative rivals, and the party base’s readiness to finally look at him and say, “OK, good enough”; or (2) a Paul victory that would be dismissed as meaningless. But when Santorum hit the jackpot last Tuesday and followed it up with a well-received CPAC speech on Friday, he became the favorite to win the straw vote, an outcome that would have accelerated the Mitt-in-freefall narrative.
The same was true in Maine, a state Romney comfortably won in 2008. This time around, he was facing a well-organized challenge from Paul, whose forces hoped to capitalize on the state’s absurdly low caucus turnout to produce an outright victory. But such a result would have been easy for Romney to dismiss as a nuisance – until last Tuesday, when his three-state meltdown turned Maine into a must-win event. Otherwise, the media – and his opponents – would have been able to spend the rest of February pointing out that he was in the midst of a four-contest losing streak. (The next primaries aren’t until February 28, in Arizona and Michigan.)
So Romney dodged two big bullets on Saturday, beating Santorum by seven points at CPAC and Paul by three in Maine. Not surprisingly, there have been cries of malfeasance, with Santorum arguing that Romney rigged the CPAC straw poll by busing in supporters and paying for their tickets, and Paul’s campaign noting that caucuses in a Paul-friendly county in Maine were postponed because of snow that was forecast for Saturday.
“A prediction of 3-4 inches – that turned into nothing more than a dusting – was enough for a local GOP official to postpone the caucuses just so the results wouldn’t be reported tonight,” Paul’s campaign manager wrote in an email to supporters.
The reality, as FHQ’s Josh Putnam explained on Sunday, is that the Maine result is very unlikely to change even when that county (along with two others that also weren’t included in Saturday’s count) holds its caucuses. So a repeat of Iowa, where an apparent Romney victory was reversed weeks later, probably isn’t in the cards. And Santorum’s griping about CPAC doesn’t add up to much; buying up tickets and busing in supporters for straw polls is a common enough practice (though it is noteworthy that Romney’s campaign previously downplayed the significance of straw polls).
The bottom line for Romney is that he did what he could do this weekend to keep the meltdown narrative from intensifying. But even as he was winning at CPAC and in Maine, a new national poll from PPP that put him 15 points behind Santorum was released. And on Sunday, PPP teased a forthcoming survey that will likely show Santorum ahead by double-digits in Michigan. So while things could be worse for Romney as this week begins, the rest of February sill promises to be far more trying for him than it was ever supposed to.
At the CPAC-Occupy beer summit 
Whitney Houston’s lessons in love 
Our non-withdrawal from Afghanistan 
“We don’t need someone to think” 
How rough it’s gotten for Mitt 
The Grammys’ most memorable moments 
A passport to utopia 
“The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog”: Not kids’ stuff 
Ricky Gervais: My conscience never takes a day off 
Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume 
