“Does everybody here think conservatives have good ideas? Good. And does everybody here think liberals have bad ideas. Well you better, this is the Conservative Political Action Conference, we’ll just throw you out.”

And with that, The Leadership Institute’s seminar on conservative college activism departed from the battle for young minds, and became a case study in the irrelevance of conservatism to young people. The Institute’s Director of Student Publications, Jeff Fulcher’s, maintained the philosophy was that, if your ideas are good, all you need is money to win. Convincing ones peers seemed beside the point, and the words “college campus” were never mentioned. He did, however, frequently repeat that the “average donor is 77 years old.” The training was about how to get checks.

The audience, just barely kept engaged by weak humor and the occasional toss of a Starburst (a bizarre Pavlovian reward for any response not totally off-base), seemed to turn on only when the lecturer mentioned one group that received a $300,000 check. The lecture, which took an entire hour to cover all the minutia of direct mailing, from the appropriate choices of envelope, paper stock, and stamp assortment, to the proper length of sentences (18 words) and paragraphs (under 6 lines), was grueling.

The seminar wasn't much of a skill-session. It was a demonstration that the single-minded pursuit of money and appeasement of old white men is not just the conservative political platform, but their entire political strategy as well.