Well, CPAC managed to gather all four of the black people at this Conference and put them on stage together, for "Conservative Solutions for Urban America."

All the usual gripes and outrage of the more conservative contingency of the black middle class were heard--we can't blame problems on the color of our skin, we must live now and forget the history of oppression, BET is ruining our youth, etc. "Antebellum rednecks have got nothing on MTV and BET, the minstrel show that is pumped into our children's brains daily," said the Congress for Racial Equality's Niger Innis. 

Some of these complaints represent common ground with people on the left--for instance, when Campus Progress hosted a showing of "Beyond Beats and Rhymes" in Los Angeles not three weeks ago, the panel including "conscious" rapper Talib Kweli spent much time ridiculing BET's founder Bob Johnson, who Innis maligned by name at this CPAC panel. In fact, Innis even critiqued Fox News for focusing their (albeit negative) coverage on figures like P. Diddy, and the media in general for presenting a warped and narrow vision of black people, as indication of their totally skewed priorities. "We care more about Anna Nicole Smith and what Britney is shaving or not wearing than a war being fought by our young people." I certainly couldn't argue with that.

When they did choose to focus on the past is where they lost me. Mychal Massie, of the National Center for Public Policy: "Slavery is over." Sure. "The civil rights struggle is over." Okay, maybe. Then, "we went from Martin Luther King to Superfly." Weird...what happened to the Black Panthers? Apparently they were part of a "militant movement that glorified a motherland that never existed" and ridiculed Martin Luther King. Not surprisingly, there was no mention of how King did get more aggressive and spoke out against the Vietnam War at the end of his life. "We went from Duke Ellington to Snoop Dogg," and, most interestingly, "we went from Shirley Chisolm to Barack Obama." Did I miss something? I guess Obama is a lamentable candidate because his father is from Africa, which doesn't exist.

I pushed open the doors to the tabling area at America's biggest conservative conference. Behold, a veritable cave of wonders.

Every organization that could remotely appeal to anyone on the right side of the political spectrum was there, in full force, and with candy. 



All the usual suspects were there--the NRA, the anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum, and a variety of right wing radio hosts. Naturally, there was a worship of all things Reagan--old campaign buttons, posters, dolls....I snagged a 2007 calendar of Reagan in provacative diplomatic poses with prominent world leaders. There was a NASCAR car, and even the Truckers' Association. 



Many tables served to promote books, such as "The Truth about Muhammad," "The un-P.C. Guide to Science," and "Liberal Lies and Conservative Comebacks" (which sounds like a desperate right -winger's book of Yo Mama jokes). The makeshift book store held nothing surprising, with the occasional exception (i.e. "The American Myth of Religious Freedom"), and interesting juxtaposition ("Terror in the Skies" next to Ted Nugent's "Kill It and Grill It").


Campus Progress' rivals were in full force. There was the Luce Institute, whose Horowitzian hate for liberal professors' "soapbox performances" fuels its effort to counter universities' shameful waste of YOUR tuition money on leftists speakers by hosting patriotic conservative ones. The Leadership Institute ("for conservatives who want to win!") gave me a pamphlet in which they anxiously encourage me to "Conduct Exciting Events!" next to a picture of a student in a giant chicken costume, complete with a sign that reads "Chirac, Le Chicken." This is meaningful student activism. They are hosting a blogging workshop, and, seemingly stuck in the earlier part of the decade, they plug it with "Learn how to start a blog and get people to read it!"

I focused my perusal on items and tables that revealed the unexpected fissures in the Conservative movement. Essential reading was the widely dispersed pamphlet "He's No Ronald Reagan: Why Conservatives Should Not Vote for John McCain," as well as several fellow attendees with "No Rudy McRomney" stickers. This isn't exactly surprising; McCain publicly declined to attend the conference, and perceived centrists like he and Guliani do not have the ground support here that Sam Brownback ("Support a true conservative") and even Jim Gilmore have. Similarly, it is a testament to the disunity of the Right that here at their biggest annual event, they chose as opening speaker one Dick Cheney--a figure most conservatives would place on the margins of their movement.

Do we hate all Muslims, or just some of them? The conservative mind today is confronted with difficult and troubling quandaries. With the lock-step obedience within the conservative movement and general ideological uniformity, disagreements among “pundits” on the right are typically rare. When they do occur, the results are bizarre and hilarious.

Dinesh D’Souza, the formerly anti-PC crusader turned pro-Muslim, anti-secularism cultural relativist, was put on a panel against Robert Spencer, author of popular bigotry-fodder book “The Truth About Muhammed.” Pitting these two hacks against each other led to perplexing results, as they each set up straw men of each other’s already ludicrous positions and clawed at them with weak and often contradictory logic.

Not used to having to digest shades of grey and complexity, the audience could not figure out whether to cheer or boo. When D’Souza pointed out that portions of the Koran and the Old Testament are hostile to non-believers, the response was definitely a boo. However, they seemed to agree both with Spencer’s assertion that Islam is inherently violent and Mohammed was himself essentially a terrorist, and D’Souza’s assertion that vilification of all Muslims will radicalize moderate Muslims. They wanted to believe, they want to love the Muslims, but, oh they're just so evil!

With D’Souza’s latest Islamist-apologizing tripe roundly denounced across the political spectrum, and Spencer’s cherry-picked piece of bigotry so poorly argued as to not even warrant serious analysis, perhaps one young attendee’s sentiments, addressed to me in incredulous response to D’Souza, express the confusion best: “but we can’t work with them! They want to shoot us in the face!”

“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.