Lyndsey is a twenty-something from Alabama who has worked on a
handful of Republican political campaigns. Maureen Dowd is a
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times.
The odds of these two women ever crossing paths were probably
astronomical and so, when they did in fact cross paths Thursday at
the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the results
were unpredictable.
Lyndsey was helping run the
CPAC Bloggers Lounge, sponsored this year by FreedomWorks and RedState.com. When the conference
shifted its venue in 2010 from the Omni Shoreham Hotel to the
Wardman Park Marriott, bloggers managed to snag a prime location in
the new facility. Whereas they had previously been stuck in an
exhibition hall away from the main events, in the new setup,
bloggers were now in a spacious room of their own connected to a
balcony with an excellent view of the Marriot ballroom stage. A
visit to the Bloggers Lounge almost instantly became a de
rigeur ritual for VIPs at CPAC, and this year’s visitors
ranged from Newt Gingrich to comedienne Victoria Jackson.
Being able to set up your laptop in the Bloggers Lounge is
therefore a sought-after privilege, and organizers made it clear
before CPAC that advanced registration would be required. So when
the New York Times columnist nicknamed “MoDo” showed up
Thursday, the unregistered arrival was denied access to the lounge
by Lyndsey. According to
one reported account, the Pulitzer-winner asked the young
Alabamian, “Do you have any idea who I am?” Via
Twitter, Lyndsey
denied that version of the story and indeed she did know who
Dowd was, but she also knew her name wasn’t on the registration
list and so it was a no-go for MoDo.
One might find a world of significance in that unlikely
encounter. While Maureen Dowd was welcome to join the rest of the
working press in the CPAC media center, it seems she preferred the
more cutting-edge online cachet to be had amongst the bloggers.
Somehow, Howard Kurtz of the I managed to make it inside with the
help of a Red State contributor who shall remain anonymous, but
Dowd’s press-corps prestige availed her naught against Lyndsey’s
steel-magnolia resolve. And Lyndsey’s path to Pulitzer-resistant
power exemplifies the astonishing ways in which the Internet has
helped re-arrange the media universe. Lyndsey’s connection to
D.C.-based FreedomWorks involved, among other things, her
friendship with a young Republican consultant named Ali Akbar (who is, believe it or
not, a Southern Baptist from Texas). By spring 2010, this
connection resulted in Lyndsey being tasked with organizing a
blogger reception for Georgia GOP congressional candidate Ray
McKinney during the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in
New Orleans. Internet impresario Andrew
Breitbart was among the attendees at that event, as was
Tabitha Hale, new
media director for FreedomWorks.
By such means did a young Alabamian rapidly leapfrog to a
position of extraordinary influence, with the assistance of a
medium that many Republican leaders have struggled to understand.
Whereas conservatives were quick to recognize and capitalize on the
power of talk radio and cable TV, the development of the
blogosphere seemed to catch many on the Right flatfooted. It was,
perhaps, a matter of timing: When blogging first emerged as a
popular phenomenon — the Gold Rush year was 2002 — the Left was
disgruntled and conservatives were relatively content. George W.
Bush was in the White House and the GOP controlled Congress and, it
seemed, everyone with any real power in the Republican Party
considered Fox News and Rush Limbaugh amply sufficient force to
counter the liberal bias of the mainstream media.
Well into the second term of Bush’s presidency, “blogger” was a
pejorative epithet among the most powerful Republicans. Not until
Democrats captured Congress in 2006 — boosted by liberal sites
like DailyKos — did senior figures in the conservative movement
grudgingly acknowledge (a) that the blogosphere mattered and (b)
that the Left had gained an edge there. Playing catch-up has been
difficult, but with support from groups like FreedomWorks and
American For
Prosperity, what might be called the “blog gap” has been
significantly narrowed. Last week’s news that
AOL had purchased the left-wing site Huffington Post for $315
million, however, was an attention-getting reminder that the gap
still remains. Last year, when
Salem Communications purchased the popular conservative site
HotAir.com from Michelle Malkin, the price was undisclosed, but
it certainly wasn’t anywhere near $315 million.
Whatever their funding disadvantage, conservative blogs
nevertheless played an important role in promoting the Tea Party
movement that helped drive last year’s overwhelming congressional
landslide for the GOP. That may have been one reason a liberal like
Maureen Dowd wanted to get into the CPAC Blogger Lounge to take a
closer look at the Right’s online grassroots. As always, however,
the main reason liberal journalists cover CPAC is to sneer and
jeer. Dowd’s Saturday column
deriding former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who received
the conference’s Defender of the Constitution Award, was an
excellent example of that genre.
CPAC also provides the leftward media establishment with an
opportunity to promote one of its perennial narratives:
Conservatives are hopelessly divided, badly out of step with the
American mainstream and, therefore, inevitably doomed to defeat.
This familiar tale dates back at least to 1964, when LBJ’s victory
over Barry Goldwater reportedly drove the final nail in the
conservative coffin. Liberals are convinced that if they will just
keep reporting The Death of Conservatism, sooner or later it will
be true.
Meanwhile, however, the obituaries appear to be premature, as
this year’s CPAC drew more than 11,000 attendees — the largest
crowd in the 38-year history of the conference. That fact didn’t
make it into Maureen Dowd’s column, just as the columnist herself
didn’t make it into the Blogger Lounge. Lyndsey doesn’t have a
Pulitzer, but surely she deserves some kind of prize for that.
