WASHINGTON, D.C. — More than 10,000 activists will convene here
today at the Wardman Park Marriott Hotel for the biggest gathering
of conservatives in history.
This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference
(CPAC) will not only be the biggest in the 38-year history of the
event, it is quite nearly certain to be the most festive and
energized. Following on the heels of last fall’s mid-term
election triumph, conservatives are in a mood to celebrate and this
three-day conference is where they will assemble for that
celebration.
You wouldn’t know this, of course, from most of the press
coverage. According to the media, the right is deeply divided by
internecine feuds, with social conservatives battling libertarians
and neocons in a grand three-way donnybrook that threatens to
destroy the Republican Party.
Sic semper hoc.
For as long as I’ve been covering CPAC, reporters have
been hyping the idea that this event is extraordinarily
controversial, using their coverage of the conference to suggest
that the conservative movement is teetering on the brink of its
final ideological implosion. The only difference this year is that
some conservatives decided to join liberals in promoting the
overhyped idea of CPAC controversy.
“Gay group in conservatives’ gathering splits
GOP,” read a headline at CNN’s
website, describing this year’s pet controversy.
The “split” exists mainly in the minds of journalists,
having been relentlessly publicized by Joseph Farah’s WorldNetDaily.com. The controversy
involves the inclusion of GOProud, which was also represented at
last year’s CPAC. That points up the fundamental problem with the
“conservatives divided” narrative being promoted in the media: The
alleged division isn’t anything new, nor is Farah’s anti-CPAC
animus.
Last March, Farah
pronounced CPAC “dead,” but this renunciation had nothing to do
with homosexuality. Instead, Farah was upset because CPAC refused
to address the so-called “birther” issue: Was President Obama born
in the United States? Farah suggested this as a topic for CPAC 2010
and, when a reporter asked conference director Lisa DePasquale
about it, she said “that isn’t something we’re
interested in.”
Having pronounced the death of CPAC in March,
WorldNetDaily returned to the theme in November with a story
headlined,”Will
the Right bring ‘gay’ agenda into the tent?” With or without
their “agenda,” however, GOProud was already inside the CPAC
“tent,” as were many other potentially controversial participating
groups, including the John Birch Society. Prominent social
conservative spokesmen — including Robert Knight of Coral Ridge
Ministries, a longtime friend of mine — gave quotes to WND
reporter Brian Fitzpatrick denouncing GOProud. Liberal bloggers and
journalists jumped on the “conservatives divided” story, and the
fact that GOProud’s participation was nothing new — and that
Farah’s grievance against CPAC was a year old — got lost in the
subsequent uproar.
No matter what anyone says, gays aren’t taking over CPAC.
I’m writing this story in the lobby bar of the Marriott, surrounded
by heterosexual conservatives, most of whom are happily married,
and all of whom are having the grandest times of their lives. As I
explained two years ago, this is “Mardi
Gras for the Right” and, after the Tea Party-fueled GOP triumph
of 2010, the mood is very much laissez les bon temps
rouler.
This is true every year. Even in years following Republican
defeats, the activists who gather for CPAC manage to have a good
time. In fact, when the media isn’t busy trying to make up
non-existent conservative divisions, they have been known to gin up
controversies about conservatives having too much fun. Most
notoriously, in 1997, Stephen Glass of the New
Republic fictionalized
a story about out-of-control College Republicans engaged in
sadistic degeneracy during the conference.
Amid all the furor over this year’s alleged controversies,
the attendance of more than 5,000 college students is one of the
big untold CPAC stories. Every year, thousands of young
conservatives come to CPAC to hear the speakers, attend seminars,
and discover that they aren’t nearly as rare as they sometimes seem
amid the dominant liberalism of American campuses. Many of the
students, in fact, aspire to careers as conservative journalists,
and will attend a CPAC event Friday afternoon called
“Jumpstarting
your Journalism Career,” hosted by The American
Spectator.
Just in case any of those would-be journalists read this
article, let me suggest that their first assignment should be to
tell the world the truth.
