"The pay is generous. The experience is priceless."

The Leadership Institute is hiring 70(!) representatives to "help conservative students break the left-wing monopoly on college campuses."

"Benefits" include:

Field reps receive $2,500 per month salary, plus $600 per week housing allowance, as well as additional allowances for cell phone use, recruitment expenses, gas, and more.

A free laptop is yours to use throughout the semester. It becomes yours to keep upon successful completion of the program.

Your employment with LI as a field rep is resumé gold. Field reps use the experience and connections they gain from LI’s National Field Representative Program to launch rewarding careers...

 Warning: May require sale of soul to Satan.

“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.