Jesse the hotel security man was at the door, and Jesse was
not happy. Our suite at Washington’s Omni
Shoreham Hotel was crammed with journalists, bloggers,
activists, publicists, think-tank wonks and sundry other guests,
and by 10 p.m. perhaps we were becoming a bit loud.
What had originally been planned by myself and investigative
journalist Matthew Vadum as a small get-together for VIPs at last
year’s Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC) had turned into a monster
party. Guests had invited friends, other people had gotten wind
of the event and invited themselves, and the soiree had
overflowed from the suite out onto the balcony outside.
Half an hour before Jesse showed up, a talk-radio producer had
climbed atop a sofa and led the crowd in a boisterous singalong.
When the security man knocked at the door, Vadum answered and
promised to try to keep things quiet henceforth. Jesse, however,
was adamant: The party was over, and all the guests would have to
leave.
I was called to the door to attempt to reach a reasonable
compromise, but Jesse — a man the size of a professional
football linebacker — was not interested in compromise,
reasonable or otherwise. Then Bob Barr showed up.
Barr, the former Republican congressman from Georgia who
eventually became the Libertarian Party’s 2008 presidential
candidate, joined the negotiations. But not even an erstwhile
member of the House Judiciary Committee could persuade Jesse to
let the party continue. “Everybody out,” the security man
insisted.
Some conspiracy theorists blamed the premature end of the VIP
party on liberal bias, suggesting that perhaps Jesse was a
Democrat who resented conservatives having fun.
Myself, I blame Mitt
Romney.
Eight hours before the VIP party convened in our suite, Romney
had announced to a packed crowd in the hotel’s Regency Ballroom
that he was
suspending his campaign for the Republican presidential
nomination. In effect, Romney’s withdrawal meant that Arizona
Sen. John McCain — or as I had begun calling him, “Crazy Cousin
John” — would be the GOP nominee.
Conservatives were profoundly disappointed by this development.
Romney hadn’t been first choice for many of them, but after Newt
Gingrich’s flirtation with a primary campaign had turned out to
be a tease, and after the Fred Thompson bandwagon fizzled, the
former Massachusetts governor had been the last best hope of the
ABM (Anybody But McCain) movement.
When Mitt quit, some of his heartbroken supporters made a beeline
to the
lobby bar seeking solace for their sorrows, and by the time
the VIP party convened at 8 p.m., a few of the guests had been
drinking since noon. Fun? Brother, you haven’t lived until you’ve
seen a “family values” advocate after her sixth margarita.
CPAC is, of course, the world’s largest gathering of conservative
activists, and a great deal of serious activism is on
the agenda when the three-day conference begins Thursday
morning with a welcome speech by David
Keene of the sponsoring American Conservative Union.
CPAC director Lisa
De Pasquale has once again organized a splendid schedule of
speeches, seminars and other events, with a record attendance of
more than 5,000 expected.
Yet for all wonderful events on the official agenda — including
speeches by Ann Coulter,
Karl Rove, Rush
Limbaugh and Republican National Committee Chairman
Michael Steele — much of the fun at CPAC is unscheduled and
unofficial.
When I try to describe it to friends who’ve never attended, I
tell them CPAC is like Mardi Gras for right-wingers. Or as
Wendy Sullivan says, “It’s like what you see on MTV’s Spring
Break, but with pearls and navy blue suits.”
Perhaps we exaggerate somewhat. It’s not a decadent bacchanalia,
but neither is it a meeting of the Southern Baptist Sunday School
board. There are some people who think the phrase “conservative”
is a synonym for such words as uptight, boring
and repressed. But most of those people are liberals who
get these stereotypes from “Saturday Night Live” sketches or
Frankfurt School propaganda.
One such liberal, apparently, was Stephen Glass of the New
Republic, who in a notorious 1997 article viciously
portrayed College Republicans at CPAC as sadistic louts —
“drunk, dejected and angry” — engaged in drug-fueled orgies.
Once Glass was exposed as a fraud,
Brent Bozell III wrote: “Everyone now knows what the CPAC
organizers knew all along: it was unbelievable because it was
invented.”
Although some College Republican kids who attend CPAC have been
known to enjoy the nightclubs of D.C.’s Adams Morgan district to
excess — they are, after all, college kids — I’ve never met one
who was “dejected and angry.” Even after Mitt the Quitter broke
their hearts last year, young conservatives quickly bounced back
from their disappointment.
The Stephen Glass smear, false though it was, points out the
vicious double standard that conservatives confront. On the one
hand, conservatives who oppose abortion and gay rights are
derided as puritanical fuddy-duddies who are “anti-sex.” On the
other hand, if College Republicans visit a nightclub in
Washington, they’re depicted as moral degenerates.
By contrast, no incident in the careers of Democratic icons like
Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Bill Clinton is ever
deemed sufficiently scandalous to demote them from the heroic
pantheon of liberal statesmen. Yet so far as we know, no College
Republican attending CPAC has ever driven into the Potomac and
left a girl to drown in the car. (And if he did, his chances of
being elected to the Senate would be nil, unless he moved to
Massachusetts and ran as a Democrat.)
Angry drug-addled decadence at CPAC? No. Optimistic good cheer?
Plenty. And if some conservatives take the opportunity to put the
“party” back in the Republican Party, that’s a Change We Can
Believe In.
