One recent night in the nation’s capital, at a restaurant near
the campus of George Washington University, veteran conservative
journalist Michael Barone had dinner with an important official
of the free-market group Americans for Limited Government and a
few of that official’s friends.
A few weeks earlier, the same ALG official had attended a
reception at a Capitol Hill restaurant, hosted by an important
official of the Heritage Foundation and featuring as guest of
honor David Frum, the former Bush White House speechwriter and
author whose career has lately become more controversial than
ever.
Controversies aside, however, these two recent events were in
some sense more significant than the regular routine of social
occasions collectively known as the Beltway “cocktail party
circuit.”
For while the ALG official and the Heritage official need not be
named here — these two events were outside their strictly
official duties — they have something important in common: Both
of them are in their early 20s and were college students as
recently as last year.
Something else they have in common: I got to know both of these
officials when they were undergraduate campus activists with the
Young America’s Foundation,
which this week convenes its annual four-day National
Conservative Student Conference at the GWU campus in Foggy
Bottom.
At a time when the question of conservatism’s future is a topic
of intense debate among senior leaders of the movement, YAF
continues quietly recruiting, educating and organizing the
movement’s junior leaders. What is surprising is the extent to
which these young people — some scarcely a year past college
commencement — are not merely the clichéd “leaders of tomorrow,”
but are already becoming recognized as leaders today.
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) was walking through a corridor on
Capitol Hill one day in March when he was approached by a
well-dressed young man who wanted to ask a question: “You know, I
was wondering, with Americans struggling just to pay their bills,
losing their jobs, why…do you drive a taxpayer-subsidized
Cadillac, score rent-controlled apartments below market rates,
and fail to pay taxes on real estate — when you write the tax
code?”
This was Rangel’s introduction to YAF spokesman Jason Mattera,
age 25, who had an assistant recording the encounter on video
when Rangel responded: “Why don’t you mind your god——
business?”
The Rangel
video has been viewed more than 100,000 times on YouTube.com,
one of a series of Mattera videos featured at Michelle Malkin’s
popular
HotAir.com blog.
Mattera seems to have been born with a special talent for driving
liberals nuts. One recent example: After Mattera mocked the “wise
Latina” posturing of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, he
was denounced by various left-wingers whose predictable
accusations of bigotry exposed their own abject ignorance.
Jason is himself a Latino, of Puerto Rican ancestry just like
Judge Sotomayor and, as a native of Brooklyn, equally entitled to
claim the supposedly wisdom-inferring urban authenticity of being
a “Newyorican.” Unlike the Bronx-born judge, however, Mattera
doesn’t flaunt any sense of ethnic entitlement and rejects
identity politics as unpatriotic.
“What’s wrong with just being an American like everybody else?”
he says. “So you’re Puerto Rican — so what?”
It was Mattera’s contempt for check-the-box “diversity” quotas
that inspired one of his earliest experiences with provoking
paroxysms of liberal indignation. As an undergrad at Rhode
Island’s Roger Williams University 2005, he and fellow
conservative students promoted a “whites-only scholarship” as a
parody of the university’s affirmative-action policies. That
project resulted, among other things, in the university chapter
of College Republicans being defunded and denounced by the state
GOP.
“I was always taught to defend my ideas fiercely, but I also like
to have fun at the Left’s expense,” Mattera says. “Young
America’s Foundation helped nurture and guide my activism at
Roger Williams. They gave me the tool necessary to advance my
ideas in a hostile environment.”
That fierce commitment in a hostile environment is part of what
YAF hopes to instill in the hundreds of attendees at this week’s
conference, which will feature lectures by, among others, Sen.
Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), Seattle talk-radio host Kirby Wilbur,
America’s Cause president Bay Buchanan, Human Events
editor Jed Babbin, Robert Spencer of JihadWatch.com, Rep. Mike
Pence (R-Ind.), talk radio host Monica Crowley, former House
Speaker and author Ann Coulter.
This week’s conference in D.C. “gives us the opportunity to teach
young people core conservative principles of limited government,
free enterprise and traditional values,” Mattera says. “We have
40 students who are eager to hear conservative ideas seldom
taught in the classroom. Not all young people are entranced with
Obama.”
