Beautiful young shock troops for Bush

But the cult of personality surrounding Bush bewildered a group of French student conservatives who'd come on a trip funded by right-wing think tanks. Jean Martinez, a dashing 24-year-old who'd organized an 87,000-strong counter-demonstration against the strikes that crippled Paris in June, admires American free-market dynamism and social mobility. Yet he looked askance at the great piles of Bush paraphernalia being hawked at the conference, saying: "This whole iconography ... we don't have this in France."

Alexandre Pesey, a 28-year-old French conservative writing a Ph.D. thesis on the conservative movement in America, England and Germany, admires Bush's honesty and was pleased with the reception his American comrades had given him. But "some are a bit simple," he mused. "You can find strange people with American-flag ties." The bellicose religiosity of the event, with group prayers before every meal, also puzzled him. "That we cannot understand," he says. "Religion is private."

The Frenchmen weren't the only conservatives put off by right-wing religious piety. "The thing ruining the Republican Party is the religious right," says Rosanne Ferruggia, a 19-year-old junior at George Washington University and the publisher of the GW Patriot, a conservative student newspaper. "I don't want Jerry Falwell out there speaking for me. The religious right people in College Republicans are not taken seriously.

"My family members are religious fanatics," says Ferruggia. "Two out of three of their pastors have been convicted of embezzlement." An agnostic, she doesn't oppose gay marriage and thinks Phyllis Schlafly is a "nut job." For Ferruggia and her friends, rancor rather than religion seems to fuel politics. They're ardent but not idealistic.

Ferruggia was sitting in the Capitol Hilton's lobby bar shortly after Rove's speech. There were three others with her -- another blond 19-year-old Georgetown student, Chris Sibeni, chairman of Hofstra College Republicans, and Jeffrey Chen, a recent Johns Hopkins graduate. Sibeni and Chen puffed on Fuente cigars.

"I'm a Republican because liberals make me sick," said Sibeni, spitting out the words. "I don't like whiny people and tree-huggers."

"You're a tree-hugger, but the tree you're hugging is the money tree," joked Chen, a jocular 22-year-old who plans to attend law school next year at either Boston University or Tulane.

After a cocktail, the foursome retired to Sibeni and Chen's disheveled room, where the hosts made the girls fuzzy navels with orange juice and peach schnapps. At which point all let loose their political ids.

Sibeni, who had spiky hair, glasses and a long face, is high-strung and given to rash pronouncements. He denounced assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. for "dividing the country" and trying to help African-Americans "advance over the white society," and defended American support of the brutal Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile. Chen, who went to high school with Sibeni in Great Neck, Long Island, is easy-going and quick to concede Republican mistakes, mocking his friend's more outré arguments.

While Sibeni declared that Bill Clinton had been more dangerous to America than Osama bin Laden, Chen defended the ex-president's economic program. "Without him," Chen argued, "we would not have had globalization. He took a Republican idea, used it as a Democratic idea, and used it to become the most popular president of all time."

Chen seemed so mild and centrist that at one point I called him a closet Democrat. Taken aback, he replied: "How am I a closet Democrat? I'm racist, I love guns and I hate welfare."

He wasn't kidding. "I'm racist against anybody who doesn't work for a living," said Chen, whose family comes from Taiwan. "We're in Washington D.C. You can guess who that is." He's no fan of religion, but says he's less bothered about paying tax dollars to faith-based programs than to "crack whores who have eight kids because it's easier than working."

"I wish there could be racial equality," said Sibeni, who, while in high school, refused to attend Martin Luther King Day celebrations. "The number one reason there's racial inequality is because of hip-hop."

"For young black men, it glorifies something they try to live up to, and they end up dead or in jail," says Ferruggia, sipping her drink.

Before the Supreme Court's decision upholding affirmative action last month, "I couldn't admit I'm a racist," Chen said. "They admitted they're racist, so now I can too."

All four of them believe they have lost opportunities to affirmative action. "I applied to NYU and I didn't get in," says Sibeni. "My SAT scores weren't the greatest ..."

"You were just another white guy from Long Island," says Ferruggia. "The only person you can really discriminate against anymore is white men."

Ferruggia, the daughter of a pharmaceutical salesman, was valedictorian of her Southwest Florida high school. "I had the highest SAT scores in between five and 10 years" at her school, she says, and feels affirmative action cheated her out of scholarships. "I watched minority after minority after minority accept these awards ... I'm tired of people whining that I'm taking away from them."

"A lot of poor white people in the trenches of Appalachia, they don't complain, they go out and work," said Ferruggia's blond friend, who sat quietly next to her for most of the evening. "Black people have been given a lot of chances ..."

"And they always screw it up," said Sibeni.

Despite his high school rebellion against Martin Luther King, Chen said Sibeni used to be a "docile, pacifist kid" who others picked on. Sometimes, Chen said, he even joined in.

Then something happened to Sibeni in 2000.

He was walking on campus one night and "two African-American males came up to me," he recalled. "They said, 'Yo, nigga, can I get a dollar?' Being the affable person I am, I took out my wallet. They grabbed the wallet, but I took it back. I saw one of them reaching in his pants. He had two circular bandsaw blades. I took off."

Sibeni had the remote-control keys to his Pathfinder, and he said he used them to set the car alarm off. Then he ran to a friend's room and started drinking.

Later that night, he continued, two Estonian exchange students were robbed and "almost beaten to death." Sibeni's attempted muggers confessed to the crime and were given two years in juvenile detention.

After that, Sibeni got into guns. He now owns an assault rifle, a shotgun and a hunting rifle that he always keeps loaded.

Looking at Sibeni sitting cross-legged on his bed, Chen said: "You used to get beat up. Now you're the one beating people up."

Sibeni has brief charitable impulses -- he considered donating his ticket to the Rove dinner to a homeless person, so he could enjoy a free steak. But the idea of being forced to contribute to a broader civic good makes him livid. Taxes, he insisted, should be abolished. Who, then, will build things like roads? "Coca Cola should be building roads just to get exposure," Sibeni said.

"Who's going to build a road in inner-city Baltimore?" asked Chen.

"It's not my problem," said Sibeni.

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