Late Wednesday night at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, the
elevator doors opened and a well-dressed man entered. “Excuse me,
but you look familiar,” I said.
“Marco… Marco Rubio,” said the Florida Republican whose
Senate campaign has become a crusade for conservatives.
Bumping into a Republican candidate isn’t exactly difficult
at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference. At times
it seems that every other person you meet in the hallway is
running for Congress, or on the campaign staff of someone who
is.
In the corridor next to the hotel lobby Thursday, retired
Army Lt. Col. Allen West was talking about the “fantastic
momentum” of his congressional campaign in Florida’s 22nd
District. In the Bloggers Lounge, I’m handed a card promoting Liz
Carter, a Republican candidate in Georgia’s 4th District, which
in 2008 voted 75 percent for Democrat Rep. Hank Johnson. On the
sidewalk outside the hotel, David Ratowitz displays his new shoes
— having worn out three pairs during his successful campaign to
win the GOP nomination in Illinois’ 5th District, which voted by
more than 2-to-1 for Democrat Rep. Michael Quigley in an April
2009 special election to replace Rahm Emanuel, now President
Obama’s chief of staff.
To borrow the lyrics of an old Buffalo Springfield song,
“There’s something happening here” at CPAC. Conservatives scent
victory in this fall’s mid-term election, and every Republican
who has ever considered running for office has decided this is
the year to do it.
Among other things, this has resulted in primary challenges
against Republican incumbents, including Arizona Sen. John
McCain, who was accused of “blatant hypocrisy” yesterday in a
CPAC speech by his GOP challenger, former Rep. J.D.
Hayworth.
The Republican Party’s 2008 presidential nominee was
slammed by Hayworth as part of the “Washington establishment” —
two words that amount to electoral poison in a year when voters
are clearly in a mood of populist resentment that is both
anti-Washington and anti-establishment. Arizona’s senior senator
“has undergone a campaign-year conversion to conservatism,”
Hayworth said in his speech to a CPAC panel devoted to First
Amendment issues.
Hayworth noted that the Supreme Court recently rejected
McCain’s signature legislation, the Bipartisan
Campaign Reform Act of 2002, as
unconstitutional. A popular talk-radio host in Phoenix, Hayworth
said McCain has attempted to “intimidate” the radio station that
airs his program.
“After 28 years in Washington…it’s time for [McCain] to
come home,” Hayworth said, eliciting hearty applause from the
conservatives gathered in hotel ballroom.
It is difficult to calculate the odds on Hayworth’s
challenge to McCain. In addition to the natural inertia of
incumbency, McCain has vastly larger sums of campaign cash, an
ironic advantage for a senator who has for years railed about the
corrupting influence of big money in politics.
The usual calculations may be irrelevant in a year when a
Republican can win the Massachusetts Senate seat held for nearly
five decades by Ted Kennedy. More than any other single event,
Scott Brown’s victory in last month’s special election has
inspired conservatives to imagine possibilities that previously
seemed impossible. Democrats may be the chief objects of this
insurgency, but the Republican status quo could also sustain
damage from the grassroots uprising.
No one symbolizes that insurgent spirit so much as Rubio,
the Floridian who was enthusiastically applauded yesterday as he
gave the keynote address kicking off this annual gathering of
conservative activists.
Perhaps no line in Rubio’s speech was so
fervently cheered as when he declared that “the U.S. Senate
already has one Arlen Specter too many” — a clear reference to
his rival in the Florida GOP rival, Gov. Charlie Crist, who was
endorsed last year by the National Republican Senatorial
Committee. Polls have showed Rubio steadily gaining against
Crist, demonstrating the declining ability of the Republican
establishment to control the outcome of contested primaries. The
omens are obvious enough.
“From tea parties to the election in Massachusetts, we are
witnessing the single greatest political pushback in American
history,” Rubio told the CPAC crowd yesterday.
There is definitely something happening here, but as that
1967 Buffalo Springfield hit said, “what it is ain’t exactly
clear.” What is clear — as one bumps into GOP candidates
casually wandering the halls of the Marriott Wardman Park — is
that conservatives believe that 2010 represents a rising
electoral tide that could lift all Republican boats.
Except maybe John McCain’s.
