"What's going on with the Party??"

My thoughts exactly. During a question and answer session after a speech by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), a perplexed gentlemen who had recently revoked his membership to the RNC posed this inquiry to Sensenbrenner. I had been wondering the same thing all weekend, doing my darndest to keep my emotions in check so that I could carefully analyze the state of the conservative movement and its habitation in the Republican Party.
 
This man's grievance with the RNC provided a clue. What he meant was that he shared the small-government philosophy that Sensenbrenner had just espoused, which was if anything the singular dominant credence at the Conference. Regarding the "Bridge to Nowhere" and other such wasteful government expenditures, he boldly asserted that "Republicans forgot how to be conservatives." Oh snap! Later, at the $100 Ronald Reagan banquet we snuck into, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) similarly blamed the 2006 election losses not on the Iraq war or corruption, but conveniently rewrote history by pinning it to lack of fiscal restraint. "We didn't govern as advertised," he said--an odd choice of words for someone denouncing the commercial whorification of Congress (also ironic was the collective ass-kissing of Mr. Fiscal Responsibility, Tom DeLay). 

Pence offered more welcome insight into the conservative mindset that I eagerly digested, between the gulps of the white wine and rolls of bread that we stole. In order to win the election, Democrats apparently co-opted the conservative values of prudent spending and a correction of the war in Iraq (how the latter is possibly a conservative value is beyond me), a war that is best to talk about in sports metaphors. "American people don't like losers, but they like quitters even less," said Pence, while ten feet away Laura Ingraham lazily text-messaged. "Victory is our policy in Iraq." In general Reagan's commitment to small government and toughness in foreign policy provided wonderfully inappropriate ways for all the speakers to interpret the contemporary state of American politics and the world at large.
 
When the conservs strayed from this script is when they got even sillier, but luckily also when they revealed the seams of their union. Before claiming that we need "better science" on global warming because today's analysts couldn't even get the weather right two weeks ago (I kid you not), Sensenbrenner launched an interesting (or desperate?) critique of Al Gore and environmentalists that I for one had never heard before: if we make the "60 - 80%" reduction in emissions that the Kyoto Accord called for, the effects on manufacturing would be such that we would need to outsource more jobs to China in order to keep up.


Now THIS was what I was looking for. Ever since McCain's spokesperson explained the Senator's absense from the Conference with the dismissal that "CPAC is not representative of the conservative movement," I had been actively investigating which factions weren't present, which were, and what unholy alliances were forming. Who was in bed with who. What does McCain mean? Did he just commit near political suicide by alienating a diverse and unified conservative front, or is CPAC just a bunch of irrelevant crazies from a specific corner of the cause? Their choice to have Dick Cheney kick off the Conference points towards the latter. But it's hard to ignore the fact that every Republican presidential nominee BUT McCain thought it was worth their time to show up.

Here's what I came up with. Sensenbrenner's weird protectionist critique of Gore represents the link between the small-gov orthodoxy and the anti-immigration camp; hence the disproportionately large presence of cowboy hatted Tom Tancredo supporters. But small government is also the founding principle of the Ayn Rand individualists, so we get the humorous picture that Niral snapped earlier, of The American Protectionist literally right beside the Libertarian Party. We have the seriously pro-life Brownback supporters, with their "No Rudy McRomney" stickers, but not their pals in the pews, the evangelicals. Nor is big business here, or if they are they're hiding amidst all the talk of how Republicans misused Congress as the piggy bank for their wealthy friends. Round this all out and the 2007 CPAC Straw Poll winner for presidential nominee is....Mitt Romney.
 
This means some of the religious-but-not-necessarily-evangelical sect of the Party can forgive Mitt for his perceived "flip-flopping" on abortion. Tis better to be a Mormon than to be a gay-friendly, apologetically pro-choice New Yorker...but barely. Giuliani came in second and waaaay ahead of McCain. What did McCain do wrong? You'd think that at a Conference where the President's name is deliberately never spoken, some would commend McCain for speaking out against him on issues like Abu Ghraib and torture. Then again, one kid I talked to dismissed Abu Ghraib by comparing it to a frat party (you can thank Rush Limbaugh for that brilliant, compassionate talking point. It was times like these in the Conference when I nearly choked on my own vomit). My guess is by not attending, McCain sought to ingratiate himself simultaneously to evangelicals who would never vote for Romney or Giuliani, and to big business. As well as to people who still see him as the much-needed straight-talking realist, the antidote to Bush-following bullshitters. I'm not convinced it was a good decision.

Anyway, you read correctly: at a Conference that worshipped Reagan's small government policies and vilifed Hillary Clinton as a socialist feminist, Mitt Romney won the straw poll--the man responsible for universalized health care in Massachusetts.

I thank you for reading this far; clearly I still haven't figured out how to write short blog posts. To make it up to you I offer the Straw Poll results, in Power Point form, found at the CPAC homepage to the left under Announcements: www.cpac.org. You'll notice that while they do pie charts for age and gender percentages, there's not one for race. Not even Power Point can cut a slice of pie as thin as the number of people of color here, I guess.