By the time Pat Boone began singing a karaoke version of his own ballad “Under God,” several journalists in the back of the ballroom had already poured themselves glasses of pilfered chardonnay. The U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Co. donated hundreds of bottles of the stuff to the Conservative Political Action Conference, a petty bribe from a leading purveyor of mouth cancer to the leading lights of the right wing. At the time, the journalistic ethics of sniping a snuff company’s right-wing booze did not seem so important.
The Jumbotron screens on both sides of the stage flashed a montage of American flags, sunsets and crashing waves. Boone, who tans his face the color of a penny, rhymed the word “God” with the word “God” as a prerecorded chorus of children’s voices played in the background. About an hour earlier, Vice President Dick Cheney had appeared from behind the blue curtains to wow the thousand or so diners with a bulldog version of the president’s last State of the Union, bluntly daring Democrats to continue opposing the war in Iraq. The night’s emcee followed with a joke about how French people screw in light bulbs. Now the diners were digging into their chocolate raspberry torte and enjoying a musical interlude. Next came Virginia Sen. George Allen, a Southerner who once hung a decorative noose from a tree in his law office. He was going to tell the diners why he should succeed George W. Bush as president of the United States. It was, by any rational measure, a good time for a drink.
The newspaper reporter sitting to my left leaned over to acknowledge the obvious. “They do need a new act,” he muttered. But do they? The crowd of intellectuals, donors, students and operatives represented at this annual conference had overseen a string of three consecutive electoral victories. They controlled much of the House and the Senate. They had easy access to the White House, and a growing portion of the Supreme Court. Along the way, they might have betrayed some of their founding principles, by expanding the size of government at a record rate and exploiting the perks of power. Yet despite it all, they had good reason to celebrate. “Through every path we’ve trod,” Boone crooned, “we can now live in freedom under God.”
With its eccentric mix of power brokers and true believers, the annual CPAC is an odd duck, even by the standards of Washington’s never-ending political conference cycle. In recent years, it has been seen by the outside world as a time of celebration for the nation’s right-wing leaders, a chance for sitting politicians to rally with the base. Indeed, the event draws big names. Over three days, a cavalcade of the powerful would pass through the basement ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel — not just Cheney and Allen, but Republican Party chairman Ken Mehlman (to bait John Kerry, again), Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (to bait Hillary Clinton, again), Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (to condemn gay marriage, again) and Ambassador John Bolton (to bait the U.N., again). These headliners drew the nation’s top political reporters, but they represented only a sliver of the action.
Of the 4,000 or so who show up for the conference, about half are overdressed college kids in pearls, blue blazers or striped ties, young Republicans who come to D.C. for the chance to flirt with each other, watch Ann Coulter act outrageous, and attempt to sneak cases of Bud Light into their hotel rooms — the kind of students that collect internships like Mardi Gras beads. Many others were older members of the obsessive political right: the Navy chaplain who went on a hunger strike, the militant Hillary haters, the self-published authors, the talk radio groupies, and one or two pot-smoking libertarians. In the exhibition hall, Lockheed Martin provided an F-22 Raptor flight simulator (the red button drops the bomb), the Objectivist Center built a shrine out of Ayn Rand book covers, and someone bid up the silent auction for lunch with Grover Norquist to $300.
The panels on states’-rights federalism, the dangers of social responsibility and voter fraud drew only piddling crowds, because CPAC is about preaching to the converted, not learning something new. But when Coulter took the stage, there was barely any standing room. She is, it must be said, less impressive in person than her reputation would suggest — offensive, outrageous, long and blond, but also bland and obvious. The fact that her shtick has changed so little since 2002 reminds one less of Eugene McCarthy than of Bobcat Goldthwait.
That said, she did not disappoint her fans, coming to the stage under the thumping dance house beats to deliver a string of punch lines. Democrats: “Someday they will find a way to abort all future Boy Scouts.” College professors: “sissified, pussified.” Harvard: “the Soviet Union.” John Kerry: the other “dominant woman in Democratic politics.” Her post-9/11 motto: “Rag head talks tough, rag head faces consequences.” For good measure, she threw in a joke about having Muslims burn down the Supreme Court — with the liberal justices inside.
Then came questions. A young woman asked Coulter to describe the most difficult ethical decision she ever made. “There was one time I had a shot at Bill Clinton,” Coulter said. A brave young man rose to explain that the Republican Party was trying to recruit Muslim voters. “Please, please, please don’t say rag head,” he pleaded. Her comeback was swift: “Yeah, I made a few jokes at Muslims. They killed 3,000 Americans.” Applause. The next guy to ask a question at the microphone told Coulter his room number at the Marriott.
A few hours earlier, those in the ballroom had been treated to an even more bizarre spectacle when two pro-marijuana groups — at least one of which is funded by billionaire Peter Lewis, bane of conservatives everywhere — staged a debate with a former pro-football player over the merits of smoking dope. “You want the government involved so bad,” thundered Ethan Nadelmann of the pro-pot Drug Policy Alliance. “What about the market … What about having confidence in people’s basic sense of freedom and good judgment.”
“We got enough lazy people in America,” objected Gary Cobb, a sports radio host, who formerly played for the Dallas Cowboys, Detroit Lions and Philadelphia Eagles. A few minutes later, the anti-weed Cobb admitted he had smoked a few joints in his time. That was about as sophisticated as the debate got. At another session, Steve Milloy, the Fox News commentator and ExxonMobil grantee, announced, “We don’t know that humans are adversely affecting the climate.” He promised to show up at a General Electric shareholder meeting to protest any actions the company takes to reduce greenhouse gases.
A 1:30 p.m. session on “Marriage in the States,” which was supposed to include Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, featured instead a self-described former homosexual named Alan Chambers. He said sodomy was like fast food: “It will kill you.” He was an expert because he had lived through the torment of gay lust, enduring “a never ending cycle of cravings and nourishment … an endless treadmill of faceless encounters, broken hearts and unmet dreams.” His research on the gay lifestyle had also taught him that gay people do not really want gay marriage (it was the liberal media) and that “lifelong homosexual relationships are not possible.” Then he declared, in the struggling voice of a recovering alcoholic, “Today I stand before you as a heterosexual man … who now lives an unparalleled life of happiness and satisfaction.” He said there were hundreds of thousands like him.
A still-gay member of the audience, who said he belonged to the Log Cabin Republicans, rose in protest. “How can you speak for all homosexuals?” he asked. “As a gay person I would like to know how I am anti-family.” Chambers let one of the other panelists take the question.
National political protests and conferences on both sides of the political spectrum have a tendency to bring out wingnuts and clowning crusaders. As a rule, such theatrics are of no interest to the networks, the Associated Press or the New York Times, which came to CPAC just to cover the big heavies like Cheney and Mehlman, hoping to discern in the variations of the stump speech some bit of news. When Cheney said that in the 2006 elections “people need to know just how we view the most critical questions of national security,” the Washington Post declared it a watershed. It was, wrote a Post reporter, “the closest a top White House official has come” to making the issue of wiretapping a “political matter.” Never mind the straight converts or the pot-smoking football players.
I was most interested in hearing Sen. Allen’s stump speech, which he has been refining on his recent trips to New Hampshire. As a stump speaker, he has a friendly, neighborly delivery, and in recent years he has been cleaning his closet of his own skeletons, even introducing a bill to apologize for the Senate’s once blocking anti-lynching legislation. In an open field for 2008, Allen is spoken about by many conservatives as the next best thing to a resurrected Ronald Reagan. In case anybody didn’t know that, Allen mentioned the former president so many times I lost count. “I think we ought to look back at history, at Ronald Reagan, the person who motivated me to get involved in politics … Ronald Reagan changed the dynamics of the Cold War … Ronald Reagan persevered … As always, Ronald Reagan was right.” The rest blurred together. Like almost every presidential candidate, he promised to double the number of engineers and be strong in the war on terror.
Like the Senate’s Dr. Frist, Allen has a tendency to use biographical metaphors. For Allen, it’s all about football, owing to his own brief time on the gridiron and the fact that his father, of the same name, coached the Washington Redskins and the Los Angeles Rams. He kept calling the conventioneers his “team.” At about that point, I looked around for the journalists, the members of my “team,” whom I had seen stealing sips of chardonnay a few minutes earlier. But they had already left, gone home to their families. Almost three years out, the campaign season was not yet in full swing.
After George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union last week, White House aides arranged a private conference call with the president’s top conservative allies. The goal was to rally cheerleading pundits with talking points, but right-wing leaders called in with a heavy sense of foreboding.
“I listened in on several White House calls before and after, boosting the troops,” said Richard Viguerie, the 72-year-old direct mail pioneer who rose to fame and fortune working on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. “They all sang the same song — ‘Oh boy, we hit a home run.’” Viguerie wasn’t buying it. “Look at the treatment conservative issues got in the State of the Union. It was just perfunctory. It almost wasn’t there. It was very disappointing.”
Instead of shoring up the conservative base, Bush’s bland rhetoric and ticky-tacky domestic initiatives — more switchgrass, less malaria — only confirmed conservatives’ ever-growing concern: Far from an heir to the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the president has become just another free-spending, big-government politician.
The governor who wooed conservatives in 2000 became a president who increased federal education spending, signed a pork-laden 2002 farm bill, and passed the largest new entitlement since the days of Lyndon Johnson, the Medicare prescription drug bill. After becoming a champion of leave-us-alone libertarians, he went on to authorize a vast expansion of executive power with the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretapping of Americans. And after promising to appoint another Supreme Court justice like Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, he nominated his own ideologically unknown lawyer, Harriet Miers, to the job.
As Viguerie put it, “When there are no microphones around, when it is just us there, people are really, really ticked and frustrated.” With the 2006 elections just over the horizon and the 2008 presidential race already underway, activists like Viguerie are no longer content to just sit by and shake their pompoms.
A day after the speech, conservative pundits George Will, Peggy Noonan and Robert Novak had all panned Bush’s performance in syndicated columns. The Wall Street Journal editorial page compared Bush’s new agenda to — gasp! — “Clintonian ‘triangulation.’” The Web site of the socially conservative Family Research Council criticized the White House’s lack of resolve on moral issues, noting Bush’s passing reference to keywords like “values,” “family” and “life.” “Trust is not unconditional,” Tony Perkins, the group’s leader, warned GOP leaders in a videotaped message posted online. Even Phyllis Schlafly, the grand dame of the right-wing Eagle Forum, penned a biting article on the president’s centrist immigration proposals. “Bush is alienating his political base,” she declared, “and creating what one RNC [Republican National Committee] member calls an ‘enthusiasm deficit.’”
Listen carefully and one can hear the slap of a new gauntlet being thrown down at the feet of the president and the GOP leaders in congress: Change course or face a depleted, if not disastrous, conservative turnout in the 2006 midterm elections. “Winning can be overrated sometimes,” explained Viguerie, who began his career comfortably on the right-wing fringes of the Republican Party. “There have been times when we have advanced the cause in a major way when we lose.”
No one yet knows how many conservatives will follow through with these threats. But the feeling among the grass roots may be more unsettled than at any point since 1998. “There is a sort of universal disquiet,” explains David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, who will welcome the Conservative Political Action Conference, the largest annual gathering of right-wing activists, to Washington on Thursday. “But it’s unclear whether it’s serious enough to result in the sort of depression that would elect a bunch of Democrats in 2006.”
To counteract the rumblings, activists with the closest ties to the White House have launched a counteroffensive to rally the troops back to the president’s side. In a recent article in the American Spectator, Grover Norquist, a conservative activist close to Bush advisor Karl Rove, argued the Republican Party was beginning to turn a corner after a disastrous end to 2005. “A rational conservative movement would be moderately happy,” Norquist says, pointing to the regular rounds of tax cuts, the 2003 partial birth abortion ban and the two recent appointments to the Supreme Court. “Do I have everything I want? No. But that was a problem that started when I was 2.”
Instead, he blamed the current anger over the president’s weak-kneed agenda on moderate Republicans in Congress. “The response to being 20 votes short of actual control in the House and another five to seven seats in the Senate is to get more conservatives elected,” he said. “Not to whine.”
Until now, conservative Republicans have been Bush’s most loyal acolytes. In the last year, overall voter approval of Bush fell from about 50 percent to 38 percent, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Over the same period, however, conservative Republican support dropped only half as many points, from 94 percent to 88 percent. “Bush has less loyalty across the board,” explained Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Center. “But I would be more concerned about the moderate Republicans or the non-conservative Republicans.” According to Pew’s estimates, hardcore social and economic conservatives make up about 20 percent of the American voting public and about 40 percent of Bush’s 2004 ballot total.
But times may be a-changin’, say several conservative leaders. With three years left of his administration, Bush’s work as a tax-cutter and judge-picker is mostly done. Like the rest of Washington, conservatives are beginning to look beyond Bush to the 2008 election, where the moderate John McCain, the conservative movement’s longtime nemesis, is poised to win the Republican presidential nomination. “The first race is going to be to decide who is going to take on John McCain,” said Keene. “If the first race is decided late, John McCain will be the nominee.” While names pop up — like Virginia Sen. George Allen, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford — the conservative leaders have yet to find any consensus on a single nominee. “There is certainly a need for a conservative candidate,” explained Schlafly. “And conservatives do not know who that person is.”
According to one theory being circulated, a major GOP defeat in 2006 could actually help McCain’s GOP challenger by forcing the party to shift right as it heads into the 2008 races. As Viguerie stressed, past Republican electoral defeats had repeatedly led to conservative victories. “If Ford had been elected in ’76, no way Ronald Reagan would have been elected president in 1980,” explained Viguerie, who stopped short of endorsing a GOP defeat. “And for sure, if [George H.W.] Bush had been elected in ’92, no way you would have a Republican Congress in 1994.”
In the meantime, conservatives have upped their rhetorical attacks on the White House. Schlafly points to a little-noticed donnybrook that took place on Jan. 19 at the annual meeting of the Republican National Committee in Washington. Behind closed doors, the White House sent in Vice President Dick Cheney and Republican Party chairman Ken Mehlman to prevent a debate over Bush’s guest worker program, a major sore spot for many seal-the-border conservatives. Schlafly says conservatives will not stand for that kind of treatment. “The conservative Republicans are a grass-roots movement,” she said, “and they don’t want to be a Bush party.”
In fact, the conservative pressure on the White House will only intensify in the coming months. At the end of February, Bruce Bartlett, a conservative who worked in the Reagan White House, will release a widely anticipated book, “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.” Bartlett describes Bush’s control of the party as tenuous. “Conservative discontent remains strong and is simmering very slightly below the surface,” he wrote Salon in an e-mail. “At some point, a serious Republican candidate for 2008 is going to recognize that running against Bush may be the ticket to the nomination.”
That is just the thing that the conservative movement’s founding leaders hope will happen. For Viguerie, Schlafly and other supporters of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, Bush is little more than a wobbly steppingstone in the decades-long conservative revolt against the liberal status quo. As a president, Bush long ago betrayed the movement’s core values. “It seems to me that early on Bush and Rove decided on a one-word strategy to govern and for reelection in 2004. That one-word strategy was ‘bribery,’” said Viguerie, whose next book, provisionally titled “The Betrayal of Conservatives,” is due out this summer. “You got the votes, we got the money. Let’s talk.”
“I feel like the conservatives almost have to be like the Jews from the Old Testament, who had to wander 40 years until that generation passed from the scene,” he continued. “We have to have new leaders. Hopefully the Lord won’t make us wait 40 years.”
Blustery rhetoric like this is nothing new for political activists on the left and the right. Ideological purists often find themselves shunted aside once their party is faced with the task of governing. But at a time when the nation is so deeply polarized and so evenly divided, the slightest erosion of the president’s political base could have exponential effects. Democrats in Congress might yet live to see the day when they can thank activists like Viguerie for sticking to their guns.
It’s a good thing I went to the Conservative Political Action Conference this year. Otherwise I never would have known that, despite the findings of the authoritative David Kay report and every reputable media outlet on earth, the United States actually discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, vindicating all of George W. Bush’s pre-war predictions. The revelation came not from some crank at Free Republic or hustler from Talon News, but from a congressman surrounded by men from the highest echelons of American government. No wonder the attendees all seemed to believe him.
The crowd at CPAC’s Thursday night banquet, held at D.C.’s Ronald Reagan Building, was full of right-wing stars. Among those seated at the long presidential table at the head of the room were Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, Dore Gold, foreign policy advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and NRA president Kayne Robinson. Vice President Dick Cheney, a regular CPAC speaker, gave the keynote address. California Rep. Chris Cox had the honor of introducing him, and he took the opportunity to mock the Democrats whose hatred of America led them to get Iraq so horribly wrong.
“America’s Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd,” he crowed. Then he said, “We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq.” Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation.
And why would they? Like comrades celebrating the success of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, attendees at CPAC, the oldest and largest right-wing conference in the country, invest their leaders with the power to defy mere reality through force of insistent rhetoric. The triumphant recent election is all the proof they need that everything George W. Bush says is true. Sure, there’s skepticism of the president’s wonder-working power among some of the old movement hands — including the leaders of the American Conservative Union, which puts CPAC on. For much of the rank and file, though, the thousands of blue-blazered students and local activists who come to CPAC each year to celebrate the völkisch virtues of nationalism, capitalism and heterosexuality, Bush is truth. They don rhinestone W brooches and buy mouse pads, posters and T-shirts showing the president as a kind of beefcake Uncle Sam, with flowing white hair and bulging muscles threatening to rend his red, white and blue garments.
It’s not only liberals who have noticed that Bush’s most committed followers are caught up in the fact-filtering force field of a personality cult. In January, Paul Craig Roberts, assistant secretary of the treasury during the Reagan administration and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal’s far-right editorial page, published a damning column in the progressive Z Magazine about fascist tendencies in the conservative movement. “In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush,” he wrote. “Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy.”
This kind of ground-level devotion was key to the volunteer-driven get-out-the-vote campaign, and the administration sent important emissaries to convey the president’s gratitude. Although the Republicans always have high-powered representatives at CPAC, this year the lineup at the three-day conference is particularly impressive. On the first day alone, attendees heard from Karl Rove and Sen. Rick Santorum as well as Cheney. Tonight, there will be a speech by Zell Miller, the former Democratic senator who delivered the vein-popping keynote address at this year’s Republican National Convention. He’ll be delivering a “Courage Under Fire” award to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Tomorrow, we’ll hear from Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman and Newt Gingrich.
Neither Cheney nor Rove said anything very interesting. As he does most years, the vice president essentially rehashed Bush’s State of the Union, although he mercifully omitted any reference to the Federal Marriage Amendment. Rove’s speech was about the growth of the right from “a small principled opposition” to “a broad and inclusive movement that is self-assured, confident and optimistic, and forward leading, and most important of all, dominant in American politics today.”
Their mere presence was more significant than their words, putting the White House imprimatur on an event that featured, in addition to the Swift Boat Veterans, venomous CPAC regulars like Ann Coulter, Oliver North and Michelle “In Defense of Internment” Malkin. It was yet more evidence that this administration puts little distance between itself and the most reactionary forces in the Republican Party.
The people who come to CPAC range from very conservative to proto-fascist. Within that grouping, though, are a host of different concerns. Some of CPACers hate taxes and love guns but are basically social libertarians. Others, like the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, a far-right Catholic outfit, support the criminalization of homosexuality and oppose legalized birth control. A few have very specific grievances, like the man who stood after Santorum’s talk to rant about judges who discriminate against fathers during custody disputes and women who won’t let their ex-husbands see their children more than twice a month.
In his speech, Santorum tried to unite the various constituencies behind the anti-gay marriage amendment with the Orwellian argument that such an amendment is actually necessary to keep government out of people’s private lives.
“I know there are some people who may be economic conservatives and not consider themselves cultural conservatives,” he said. Addressing himself to them, he tried to explain how banning gay marriage is crucial to laissez-faire governing. “Think about those communities where marriage does not exist,” he said, invoking their poverty and illegitimacy. “What you see is a model of what life would look like in a country that has fathers and mothers not wedded together in strong relationships to raise children.” In poor neighborhoods, he said, there’s a strong government presence, “because if Mom and Dad isn’t there to raise the child, someone else has to bridge the gap, and that someone else is always the government.”
Santorum didn’t quite explain how proscribing gay unions would strengthen families in poor communities. The assumption seemed to be that homosexuality would make a travesty of matrimony. Like a suburban block where undesirables insist on moving in, its worth would go down. “If we deconstruct marriage in society, if we say marriage is whatever you want it to be, then marriage loses its intrinsic value,” he said.
“I’m talking at a very protective level about what is important to our society if we are to be a free people,” he said. “The less virtue we have in our society, the more the need for government to control our lives, to govern our lives.” In other words, government needs to enforce virtue in order to keep government out of our lives.
This argument seemed to make sense to his audience.
Who needs logic when you’ve got power?
