The GOP gets gaudy in Michigan

Thompson was followed by Arizona Sen. John McCain, who garnered some of the biggest cheers of the conference, in part because it was late and people had been drinking for hours. "I was informed that I was the last speaker," he said on taking the stage. "I feel a bit like Zsa Zsa Gabor's fifth husband, who on her wedding night said, 'I know what I am supposed to do; I just don't know how to make it interesting.'" Reading from a prompter, he offered a vigorous defense of the current military policy in Iraq. "We must not choose to lose," he said. But perhaps the biggest applause of the conference came when he criticized Columbia University for inviting the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to speak on campus. "A man who is directing the maiming and killing of American troops should not be given an invitation to speak at an American university," he thundered, yielding a standing ovation.

The night before, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited the island just long enough to deliver a 35-minute dinner address. After speaking at length about the importance of staying "on offense" in the war on terror, he offered what has become the central argument of his campaign: his own electability. "I honestly think I have the best chance of defeating Hillary Clinton," he said. "If we are going to win back the House, if we are going to win back the Senate, we cannot go into the next election giving up New York, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Washington, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan." As soon as the speech was over, he left without shaking voters' hands or glancing at the press. His ferry off the island that night was packed with supporters of the libertarian Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who, according to several accounts, spent the ride shouting Paul chants in Giuliani's general direction.

The candidates' appearances, however, were almost tangential to the real point of the weekend, which was to celebrate the pleasures of money and privilege. The diners supped on cold strawberry soup, prosciutto, and pecan-coated ice cream balls. People did not use the word "money" when they talked about money. "Everyone in this room understands the importance of resources, the importance of finance, in winning campaigns," said Dick DeVos, the son of the billionaire founder of Amway, who lost a costly race for governor last year, which he funded with $35 million of his own fortune.

Scratch beneath the glitz, however, and it was not hard to find the real economic concerns that shape modern-day Michigan. Not everyone in attendance was as rich as the setting made it appear. Anuzis said many had saved up money for months to make the biannual trek up to the island. And everyone, regardless of class, understood that the state was in trouble. "Michigan is just going down the tubes," said Gordon Trute, a committee member of the Mecosta County GOP, who has seen two manufacturing companies he worked for go out of business. "We have nothing left now."

These economic concerns are likely to loom large as primary day approaches. About 80,000 Republicans are expected to vote in the Iowa caucuses. The New Hampshire primary could garner around 260,000 Republican ballots. By comparison, the Michigan Republican primary, which will occur just days later, is expected to bring about 1.2 million voters to the polls, a group that includes independents who can vote on a GOP ticket. Whatever the final outcome, the voters on primary day will surely represent a broader coalition than the elites who traveled to the Grand Hotel to admire the view from the porch. As it stands now, Romney leads in most polls, in part because of his family's name identification, and in part because he is the only candidate with a full team of staffers devoted to Michigan.

After the final speech was given and the last pecan ball consumed Saturday night, I stumbled away from the hotel, glad to be free of tea times and low-tax talk. Farther down the street, where people can walk wherever they please, I found a local watering hole where no one wore a pastel sport coat. "Too many damn Nazis around," said a lady sitting at the bar, when I asked her how she was doing. She was a local, one of the few hundred who live year-round on the island, and she was not referring to the man sitting next to her, with the human skulls tattooed on the back of his hand. Rather, it was the boatloads of visiting Republicans that had gotten her goat. "That is their safe haven up there," she said of the Grand Hotel.

Asking to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from the hotel's powerful owner, she told me about the tensions between the Grand Hotel and the island residents. She explained how the hotel seemed to parcel out jobs by race and ethnicity: Jamaican waiters, Austrian chefs, Hispanic housekeepers and grounds crew, Caucasian drivers for the horse-drawn carriages. She told me how the locals sneak into the hotel pool in the summer, and how the winters are better, because there are no tourists and you can snowmobile down the street. She said she had no plans to vote in the coming election, nor did most of the people she knew. She couldn't stand President Bush, and she was convinced the whole political game was crooked.

For the first time all weekend, I felt I was finally speaking with someone who wasn't playing a part. Her political views seemed likely to be more representative of the state than those of the 2,000 Republicans up at the Grand Hotel. "There is a whole other side to this island from the lilac fudge and the horses," she said. It was a side of the island that probably didn't smell half as bad.

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