TAMPA, Florida — A day of overcast skies gave way to a night of
steady rain here Sunday, and a gusty breeze was ruffling the palm
trees outside the mansion near the bay by the time former
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour was asked to speak at the private
party.
“This is the most important presidential election of anybody in
this room’s lifetime,” Barbour told the conservative bloggers and
activists crowded into the living room. “I’m the oldest person in
here, and there’s never been an election in my lifetime with the
consequences or the stakes in this election, because there’s never
been an election where the difference between the candidates of the
two parties was greater.”
Barbour’s words inspired a respectful silence from the festive
crowd at Blog Bash, the party that drew together a high-caliber
contingent of conservative New Media operatives for a night of
cheerful schmoozing with a lavish buffet and an open bar.
Co-sponsored by the National Bloggers Club and Palladian View, a South
Carolina-based digital magazine focused on conservative women, the
event at the mansion on South Shore Crest Circle was one of
hundreds of parties that will be attended this week by those in
Tampa for the Republican National Convention. And they were
partying with especial enthusiasm Sunday night because of the
tropical storm that resulted in the cancellation of Monday’s
convention schedule.
The Republican Party will meet pro forma today, long enough to
gavel itself into recess until Tuesday because of fears about
Tropical Storm Isaac. Confronted with dire warnings about the
possibility of a hurricane hitting Tampa with winds above 70 miles
per hour and a dangerous tidal surge, GOP chairman Reince Priebus
chose to
err on the side of caution. “We’re not going to put delegates
on a bunch of buses between Clearwater and St. Petersburg when we
can’t predict how severe the wind is going to be and how bad the
damage will be,” Priebus said in a conference call Saturday,
explaining the decision to scratch Monday’s schedule.
Priebus’s caution proved unnecessary, as Isaac veered west
across the Gulf of Mexico toward the Louisiana coast. The center of
the storm missed Tampa by 200 miles, producing steady rain Sunday
night, but nothing near the potential catastrophe that had been
hyped in the media for several days. The unreliability of the
mainstream media is not exactly surprising to Republicans, and was
part of the reason that Barbour, himself a former RNC chairman,
came to the Blog Bash party at the mansion. Addressing an audience
filled with such New Media celebrities as Dana Loesch of
Breitbart.com and Katie Pavlich of Townhall.com, Barbour reminded
them of an era when conservatives had a much harder time speaking
back to the power of the liberal-leaning mainstream media.
“I grew up in the political world when, at 6:30 Eastern, 5:30
Central, 90 percent of the TV sets in the United States were on
ABC, NBC or CBS,” Barbour, 64, told the gathering, reminding them
of a pre-Drudge, pre-Limbaugh, pre-Fox News media environment
“where almost all the news that reached Americans was strained
through the editorial boards of the New York Times, the
Washington Post and the Associated Press. For
conservatives, that was a bad model. We are blessed today where
people have all sorts of sources of information. You are really an
important one of those sources.”
Many of those in attendance were too young to remember the world
described by Barbour, and can’t imagine what political news was
like before the rise of New Media. Even as Barbour spoke to the
Blog Bash crowd, the Drudge
Report was headlining a story from the website of a local Tampa
TV station about an anti-RNC
protester who was arrested while carrying a machete. Hundreds
of left-wing protesters, many of them associated with the “Occupy
Wall Street” movement, have descended on Tampa for Convention Week.
The reported arrest of a weapon-wielding radical exacerbated fears
of violence by the protest mobs, but it is unlikely that the
anti-Republican demonstrators will pose any real safety threat, if
only because of the extreme security measures deployed to protect
the RNC.
The downtown area surrounding the convention venue is known as
“the perimeter,” and is surrounded by a vast law-enforcement
contingent. “It’s like the Green Zone in Baghdad — it’s scary,”
said one GOP consultant who attended Sunday’s Blog Bash party.
However potentially dangerous the anarchist mob might be, there
isn’t much chance they can penetrate the vigilant security cordon
and disrupt this week’s convention. Unworried about such
disruptions, Republicans here are in a mood to party, but remain
mindful of the seriousness of the stakes in the campaign ahead.
When the convention finally begins Tuesday, there will be only 10
weeks remaining until Election Day, and when Haley Barbour
addressed conservative bloggers Sunday night, he emphasized the
importance of the campaign.
“You’ve got an obligation to your children and grandchildren to
make sure Barack Obama goes back to Chicago… because we can’t stand
four more years of this,” Barbour said. “Eight years of Obama is
not twice as bad as four. There is an exponential damage that is
done to our country if he gets four more years.”
It was a serious warning, in some ways more serious than the
hurricane warnings that had postponed the convention proceedings,
as Republicans prepared to face the approaching storm of the fall
campaign.
