YouTube user “Nate C” has a must-see video of anti-gay activist Ryan Sorba’s CPAC speech. The angle most people have seen is the one that C-Span captured with a camera pointed directly at the stage. Nate was in the front row, and captures two fascinating images — the “what’s he doing?” looks on the faces of the other panelists, and the reaction of Young Americans for Liberty director Jeff Frazee after being called out by Sorba.
For some reason, Kentucky U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul never gets called the “frontrunner” in that race. Secretary of State Trey Grayson, seen as the favorite of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), still receives that title. But it’s another day and another poll — this one from Magellan Strategies — showing Paul crushing Grayson. He has a nearly 2-1 lead, 44 percent to Grayson’s 23 percent, and a whopping 31-point net favorable rating to Grayson’s 11-point net favorable rating.
The secret to Paul’s success? He’s not seen as a fringe candidate, but as an embodiment of the Tea Parties — which have a 67 percent favorable rating among GOP primary voters. And he’s aided by the endorsement of Sarah Palin. Twenty-eight percent of Kentucky Republicans favor Palin in a hypothetical 2012 primary to only 4 percent who favor Paul’s father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).
The younger Paul has been running a pitch-perfect campaign. One example: his rapid-fire response to an ad in which Grayson accused Paul of supporting “Obama’s war on coal.” Another example is this closing answer at a debate in Paducah. Watch how Paul trains his focus on the parts of hardcore libertarianism most popular with Republican voters.
Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is at the helm of a new conservative group called Liberty Central. Its first project is a poll, conducted with Tea Party Patriots, analyzing just how many current and potential conservative activists there are in the United States, and figuring out what they believe.
The most interesting thing about the poll might be the alliance between Thomas, a long-time Washington, D.C. fixer and alum of Dick Armey’s congressional office, and the grassroots Tea Party Patriots. The findings are overwhelmingly positive for Tea Partiers — 85 percent of all people polled, for example, worry that “America might be losing the core of what made America great.”
The full poll after the jump.
Via Ben Smith, I see that the America Family Association’s Bryan Fischer went nuclear over CPAC’s inclusion of GOProud and included some surprisingly hard swipes at HotAir.com, whose chief blogger Ed Morrissey is one of the best-liked people on the right. How to gauge that? Not only did Morrissey win CPAC’s “blogger of the year,” but the award was introduced, via recorded video, by Rush Limbaugh.
The full post, titled “Conservatives can kiss off ‘Hot Air’ blog”:
Wow. Just as soon as the “Hot Air” blog was purchased by the Christian conglomerate Salem Communications from conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, it has suddenly become an advocate for all things gay. What in the world is up with that?
For background, GOPROUD is an organization dedicated to advancing special rights for homosexual behavior, and advocates the overthrow of the Defense of Marriage Act and the overthrow of the law banning homosexual service in the military.
Not only was GOPROUD welcomed at CPAC, an event which is supposed to be the annual showcase for conservative values, the organization was allowed to sponsor the event, giving visibility and recognition to its effort to legitimize sexual deviancy.
In other words, for David Keene and the others who run CPAC, natural marriage is not, in their judgment, a fundamental conservative value. This conference, for the sake of truth in advertising, should be relabeled “The Libertarian Political Action Conference.” It has forfeited any legitimate claim to the “Conservative” moniker.
A Saturday post, from Republican, takes one of my new heroes, Ryan Sorba of California Young Americans for Freedom, to task for making the common sense statement at CPAC that homosexual sex cannot lead to reproduction. For this obviously correct observation, he was booed off the stage. And “Hot Air,” now under Christian management, has made Sorba out to be the bad guy.
Sorba showed the courage of his convictions by simply declaring the truth. Said Sorba, “Civil rights are grounded in natural rights, and natural rights are grounded in human nature…and the intelligible end of the reproductive act is reproduction…civil rights, when they conflict with natural rights, are contrary…” At this point, his remarks were drowned out by a chorus of vitriolic, angry boos. (View video of his remarks here.)
Consequently, Sorba said, “I’d like to condemn CPAC for bringing GOPRIDE (he meant “GOPROUD”) to this event.”
For speaking truth to power, “Hot Air” accused Sorba of “bombthrowing,” and said his remarks represented a “gratuitous and public…slam on homosexuals.”
The lead blogger of “Hot Air,” Ed Morrissey, has apparently experienced a new-found freedom under Salem’s Christian leadership to bash proponents of morality grounded in natural law. Said Morrissey, “At some point, Republicans will need to get over their issues with homosexuality.”
Sorba was certainly right to condemn CPAC for this move. The bottom line here is if conservatives are looking for an annual convocation of genuine conservatives – those who are fiscal, national security and social conservatives – the place to be is the Values Voter Summit.
VVS, sponsored each fall by the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, will never waver on the truth that protecting one man – one woman marriage is the most fundamental conservative value of all.
Frank Bruni reports a new fact in the Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) origin story. How and why did he acquire his “famous truck,” as he calls it?
As Arianna, the younger of his two daughters, told me, he originally purchased it not so he could haul lumber but so he could attach it to a trailer bearing her horse. He soon abandoned that plan. “It’s scary pulling a trailer,” he said, adding that he instead used the truck “for all of her horse stuff” and “it always smelled.”
Democrats made a hash out of their Brown counteroffensive — President Obama said, sort of clumsily, that Brown’s image was just that, an image, and “anyone can buy a truck.” As Bruni points out, Brown (unlike, say, Doug Hoffman) is really a successful politician with an enviable lifestyle. But the bumbling Democrats, led by Martha Coakley, had no idea how to turn that into a negative. And in the state where the Kennedys became (and remain) populist heroes, perhaps it was an impossible task.
A liberal St. Louis blogger passes on this November 29, 2009 video of James O’Keefe and Joseph Basel — who would be arrested two months later for a still-mysterious hidden camera operation they attempted in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).
Blogger Adam Shriver argues that the video reveals the activists to be “jerks” who moved conspiratorially around a rally protesting the Catholic Church’s donations to an anti-gay marriage initiative. I’m just wondering what Basel was doing there. We know that O’Keefe was in St. Louis on November 28 to speak at a Tea Party rally. But here we see O’Keefe and Basel working together — on an apparently unsuccessful project — long before New Orleans.
Former congressman John Kasich, running for governor of Ohio after a solid decade of local Republican pols begging him to make the plunge, is seen as one of the party’s best candidates in a blue state. At CPAC, 2006 Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell beamed with confidence when I asked him how Kasich was doing. So the news of a Quinnipiac poll that shows Kasich slipping against Gov. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio) is a surprise. Strickland has climbed from a 40-40 tie to a 44-39 lead, improving his standing on every issue, even as Kasich narrowly leads on some (like fulfilling campaign promising and balancing the budget).
What’s the poll tell us? Only 45 percent of voters approve of President Obama — six points down from his 51 percent victory in 2008, but not quite a toxic number that can poison Strickland. More importantly, 56 percent of voters disapprove of current health care legislation, and in that they join Strickland, who’s created some daylight between himself and national Democrats by criticizing it. Fifty-three percent, however, want Obama and Congress to keep working on health care reform.
It’s one poll, but it might give pause to Republicans who think the 2009 off-year elections and 2010 Massachusetts race point to an electoral tsunami that they can ride to easy wins. Strickland is in far better shape than, for example, former Gov. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) was at this point in 2009 — last February, he trailed now-Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) by six points.
Spencer Kornhaber follows up on the story of Orly Taitz seeking … something from the United Nations as she faces various shadowy threats to her crusade to declare President Obama illegitimate. Jonathan Levy, Taitz’s attorney (and fellow graduate of the correspondence William Howard Taft Law School), explains the alleged “assassination attempts”:
I didn’t investigate it personally, but we know she’s disliked by a large number of people, some of whom are organized. It’s certainly plausible. And therefore, because it is a serious allegation, it would merit an investigation.
Why the UN? Because no one else will listen!
It has the appearance that there is something wrong here. And that’s why she would take the extreme measure of going to the U.N. Because where else is she supposed to go?
Jeanne Cummings digs through the RNC’s finance reports and comes out with details that don’t reflect well on Chairman Michael Steele’s spending habits. For example:
RNC meal costs are among the categories that saw the biggest increases under Steele’s leadership. In Beverly Hills, Calif., the RNC spent $10,600 on food and lodging for a fundraiser featuring former Speaker Newt Gingrich at Spago, the flagship restaurant of the Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining Group. In total, the Wolfgang Puck enterprise has collected more than $94,000 from the RNC for catering services, compared with zero dollars in 2005.
The closer we get to the midterms, the lower the likelihood of Steele’s detractors ousting him. He’s in somewhat the same position Howard Dean was in 2006, beloved by local Republican groups (I remember how they mobbed him for photos a year ago when he won this job), constantly attacked by D.C. party leaders for his inability to meet their fundraising-and-spending goals, but bulletproof because the party’s winning.
If the Democrats succeed in passing health care reform through some form of compromise and reconciliation, they’ll have been aided by the confidence of anti-reform forces who basically considered the battle won in January. In this video, Rick Scott of Conservatives for Patients Rights thanks supporters for, basically, defeating Democratic plans to reform health care. The video was released on February 17; CPR, which has spent 11 months on the airwaves, has been less visible of late.
Video after the jump:
The first vote of conservative superstar Scott Brown’s (R-Mass.) career helped torpedo a key labor nominee. The senator’s second vote will be less pleasing to Tea Partiers. The statement:
I came to Washington to be an independent voice, to put politics aside, and to do everything in my power to help create jobs for Massachusetts families. This Senate jobs bill is not perfect. I wish the tax cuts were deeper and broader, but I voted for it because it contains measures that will help put people back to work.
I was disappointed with the continuation of politics-as-usual in the drafting of this bill, as it was crafted behind closed doors, without transparency and accountability. I hope for improvements in that process going forward. All of us, Republicans and Democrats, have to work together to get our economy back on track. I hope my vote today is a strong step toward restoring bipartisanship in Washington.
I try not to write about every development in the career of Orly Taitz, but I have to make an exception for her appeal to the United Nations for “urgent action under the mandate for human rights defenders.” Her attorney, Jonathan Levy, writes that Taitz is under “increasing legal attack in the United States from groups and individuals opposed to her legal actions challenging the Constitutional qualifications of Barrack Hussein Obama to hold the office of President of the United States.”
The irony of Taitz appealing to the hated organ of world government for this really goes without saying.
The next few months are going to see the release of books by a few rising conservative stars who came up the same way around the same time. In March, conservative Threshold Editions is publishing “Obama Zombies” by Jason Mattera of Young Americans for Freedom. In April, it’s publishing “Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity” by pundit S.E. Cupp. In May, Grand Central Publishing is releasing “The Bible of Unspeakable Truths” by “Red Eye” host Greg Gutfeld.
All three authors were obscure five years ago (although Gutfeld had a successful magazine career) — all became known in the waning days of the Bush presidency for youth-centric, sarcastic and funny attacks on liberals.
Cupp’s book cover is not yet available on Amazon or Threshold’s Website, but there was a preview of it at CPAC, making her appeal pretty explicit.
Mark Dice, a somewhat well-known 9/11 conspiracy theorists, is launching a campaign against Glenn Beck for his disrespect of the “truther” movement. Beck’s adroit handling of fringe conservatives — he gets away with a lot on his show, in part, by instituting blanket bans on “birther” and “truther” distractions — culminated this month in his devastating interview with Debra Medina, a Ron Paul-inspired candidate for Texas governor who choked on a 9/11 question in an interview with the radio and TV talker.
Dice’s previous career highlight:
I clicked through to double-check the details of the jobs forum being hosted tomorrow by the American Action Forum, the new conservative think tank fronted by Norm Coleman. Alas:
Pulled from my iPhone camera at CPAC — thus, the occasionally quiet audio — is a sample of the reception Max Blumenthal got while trying to interview ACORN stinger Hannah Giles.
And here’s Blumenthal’s video:
I see what Mark Wuerker is illustrating with this cartoon — which portrays Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist and FreedomWorks’s Dick Armey shedding business suits and old placards. But I’m confused as to what “warrentless wiretaps,” “all power to the prez,” and “suspend habeas corpus” placards are doing on there. Both Norquist and, later, Armey, were among the few powerful, vocal critics of the Bush administration’s abuse of the Constitution. So was David Keene, still president of the CPAC-sponsoring American Conservative Union.
Perhaps the speed with which their old statements has vanished down the memory hole says something about the hopelessness of their cause, but that’s no reason to deny them credit for their principled stands, which won them some enemies on the right.
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) (ZUMApress.com)
The news that Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) had won the 2010 CPAC presidential straw poll was leaked early, to soften the blow. Before GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio had even begun to click through a Powerpoint presentation that shared the results, reporters were informed of Paul’s easy, 31 percent victory over nine Republicans tipped as serious 2012 contenders. Those reporters started to write stories on Paul’s surprise win, waiting for the official announcement — and an explosion of jeering and booing in the main ballroom of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. Sighing with relief, press aides for the annual conservative conference made sure that the on-site media had heard that reaction.
Image by: Matt Mahurin
Just as relieved were mainstream GOP activists and traditional conservative thinkers who were pondering ways to make the party electable again. “I think Mitt Romney’s 22 percent was impressive,” said Rob Willington, a Massachusetts Republican strategist who’d designed GOTV technology for now-Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.). He was reflecting on the poll — not too significant, he said — in Murphy’s, a bar a few blocks from the hotel, late Saturday. Romney’s forces, he said, hadn’t lifted a finger; Paul’s had campaigned for the prize.
In another corner of the bar, conservative author David Frum, editor of Frum Forum (formerly New Majority), brushed off the result. “The Paul people all voted and the others didn’t,” said Frum. “I’m hoping it’s a matter of self-selection.”
The importance of minimizing Paul’s win united conservative activists like almost nothing else that came from the three-day conference. Even Brad Dayspring — who, as a spokesman for GOP whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), counts on Paul for “no” votes — fired off two tweets dismissing the result. But the 2,395 ballots cast were a CPAC record, up from the 1,757 cast in 2009, when Mitt Romney scored his third conservative win. And moments after the Paul results were booed, the crowd gave a roaring ovation to radio and Fox News host Glenn Beck, who rewarded it with a 56-minute lecture on “progressivism’s” war on American values with historical lessons — the evil of the Federal Reserve, the destructiveness of Woodrow Wilson, the folly of “spreading democracy” — that had featured prominently in Paul’s speech, too.
For as little attention as it got — for the first time in anyone’s memory, the news cycle-driving Drudge Report did not even run with the news until the next day — Paul’s victory in an unscientific straw poll revealed plenty about the state of conservatism. Narrowly, it revealed that Paul’s quixotic 2008 bid for president created a significant and growing movement of libertarian-minded teens and twentysomethings whose role in the conservative coalition will become more clear outside of CPAC. More broadly, it provided a look at the ideological hardening going on within the conservative movement as it girds for the 2010 elections. According to some polls, the Republican Party is on track to recover control of Congress and have a voice again in how America is governed. At CPAC, there was far less attention on how the party would govern America than on the need to disavow its past, popular embraces of “big government” — and on the need to embrace a hardcore libertarian philosophy that views environmentalism and the progressive movement as fatal threats to freedom.
Photo by David Weigel
Paul’s youthful crusade of hopeful libertarians — its size and its enthusiasm — was one of the real surprises of the conference. Paul-inspired or affiliated groups occupied five booths in the event’s exhibit hall; the Campaign for Liberty (the organization he launched after folding his 2008 presidential bid), Young Americans for Liberty (the student group launched at the same time), Students for Liberty, the Ladies of Liberty Alliance, and the Future of Freedom Foundation. Libertarian CPAC attendees packed room after room for lectures by the likes of Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano and likely 2012 presidential candidate Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico. They passed out a documentary about the Paul campaign, “For Liberty,” and copies of “Young American Revolution,” a magazine for college students with contributions ranging from an essay on economics by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) to a Wake Forest University student’s tipsheet on how she organized a blockbuster speech by Paul on her campus.
The Paul-inspired groups were responsible for one of the pivotal moments of the three-day conference. On Friday, Students for Liberty president Alexander McCobin used his speech in the rapid-fire “Two-Minute Activist” line-up to “commend CPAC for inviting GOProud,” a gay Republican group. That got a rise out of Ryan Sobra, an anti-gay activist who followed McCobin and condemned the conference for inviting the group. When he was booed, Sobra confusingly attacked Jeff Frazee — the head of Young Americans for Liberty. But he was onto something — it was the presence of Paul fans, who had crowded into the room for his upcoming speech, that meant Sobra would get more boos than cheers.
“I was thanking my lucky stars that the Ron Paul fans were there,” said Jimmy LaSalva, the executive director of GOProud, in a Saturday interview with TWI. “The Campaign for Liberty deserves a lot of credit for setting that tone.”
Paul’s influence surfaced in other ways that were less helpful for CPAC’s optics. The far-right John Birch Society, of which Paul has been a longtime supporter, made a showy return to the mainstream conservative fold with a co-sponsorship and booth at CPAC; because the organization helpfully offered free, spacious merchandise bags, plenty of CPAC attendees walked around sporting JBS logos. Oath Keepers, a year-old coalition of right-wing military veterans, helped distribute copies of the Paul documentary — a favor to Paul activist Michael Moresco, who had won the organization’s “citizen activist of the year” award for biking from the Statue of Liberty to Alcatraz Prison. “It’s the direction I think this country’s headed,” said Moresco — from freedom to imprisonment.
But far from being controversial, Paul’s critique of conservatism — that the GOP lost its way by growing government and must promise to slash and abolish as much as possible if it wins again — was a constant theme. It was present on Saturday when Ann Coulter, a CPAC star for whom the ballroom filled up an hour before her speech began, argued that conservatives needed to abolish the IRS and the CIA. When she ran out of jokes about John Edwards’s sexuality and Ted Kennedy’s drinking, she suggested that the GOP needed a no-to-everything philosophy similar to Paul’s. She paused and mugged when that inspired a chant of “End the Fed” — a Paul-divined slogan.
“I’m curious about this movement over there for eliminating the Fed,” said Coulter. “Yes, End the Fed.” She answered a Paul fan’s question by admitting that “if Ron Paul supports it and it’s not about foreign policy, I’m for it.”
On the surface, rhetoric like that contradicted a much-noticed CPAC theme — praise for George W. Bush. Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, told TWI that Bush boosterism was a friendly show of support for “our guy” after eight years of drubbing by liberals. And that was it.
“For seven years he didn’t speak at CPAC,” said Norquist. “The eighth year we didn’t want him and he showed up because CPAC was one of the only places he could speak to without being booed. Here was a man who deliberately divorced himself from the movement.” Medicare Part D, the Department of Homeland Security, and all the rest of it hadn’t been forgotten.
Outside of the conference, some critics accused activists of a kind of nihilism that wouldn’t be productive for Republicans. “CPAC has becoming increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years,” grumbled Mike Huckabee on his Fox News show, “one of the reasons I didn’t go this year.”
Huckabee would only allow that the Paul win reflected “the anger and the mood” that was fueling Tea Party protests and Democratic losses in some key elections. In a separate straw poll question on activists’ opinions of conservative leaders, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) was found to be the most popular figure in Republican politics– 71 percent said they liked him. In the Senate, DeMint has worked to block and filibuster as many Democratic initiatives as possible while proposing government-slashing, entitlement-cutting, brazen bills of the kind Paul’s long discussed. At CPAC, he said he’d rather have a Senate with “30 Marco Rubios” — the Florida candidate for Senate who keynoted the conference — than “60 Arlen Specters.” When TWI asked him how that made sense in the era of constant filibusters, DeMint said a crisis would lead the way to more pure policy.
“In the short term, we can’t expect to get any of our ideas through,” DeMint told TWI. “But at some point, we’re going to be forced to do something. It’s not going to be so much a matter of political philosophy if we can’t pay our debts and we’re facing default. At that point I think you’re going to see even liberals realize we don’t have any choice. We just need to be in a position where we have enough conservatives to come up with some functional policies to get us out of this.” DeMint shook his head. “I hope it won’t take a complete breakdown for us to come together.”
Paul wasn’t around to enjoy his triumph. On Saturday morning, he returned to his east Texas district to debate three opponents in his early March Republican primary. But before leaving on Friday night, he reflected on how and why his constant refrain for fiscal austerity and abolishing most 20th century government expansion had become Republican dogma.
“When I went back to Congress in 1996, Tom DeLay came out to a function in my district,” Paul told TWI. “He came out of it and he said, ‘You know what? Ron said that 20 years ago! Now it’s the same message and 20 more years.’” Paul turned and stopped to talk with a gushing middle-aged fan, then turned back to TWI.
“And with more credibility on the economics!”
YouTube user Melioped — easily spotted at CPAC, as she a donned revolutionary war-era dress for much of Saturday — filmed RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s visit to the Campaign for Liberty booth when Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) was making the rounds. The result: this still shot, which speaks to both the gregariousness of Steele and the traction Paul has gotten for his libertarian views.
Whole video:
I ducked in and out of XPAC, the lounge-for-kids (i.e., kids without photo IDs to get them into Woodley Park bars) in the basement of CPAC. Like a lot of other reporters, I chatted briefly with Stephen Baldwin. Lydia DePillas spent two days there, witnessing an award ceremony for Hannah Giles, the political debut of Autotune the News, and much more.
Problem is, it’s much harder to make the political cool than to make what’s already cool political. As Carroll talked, the night’s “jam session” was beginning—they had moved it up from the originally scheduled time of 11:00 p.m., realizing that no one would come—but most people had already filtered out as the rapper Politik took the stage. “I see y’all leaving over there!” he shouted at back of the room. “I’ve got a message!” One mom sat bobbing her head to his tea-party-centric rhymes (“two-thousand-nine, dangerous times, socialist agenda that they want us to sign!”).
“You can clap if you want to, it always makes me feel better,” Politik told the sparse audience.
Read the whole thing.