Freddy Gray meets Middle America’s radicals of the Right at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a gathering that is both bonkers and vitally important to the Republican party
In the basement of Washington D.C.’s Omni Shoreham hotel, a friendly young Korean–American is showing off his ‘Enoch Powell was right’ lapel pin. ‘People are like: “Oh, is that the British National Party?”’ he says. ‘And I’m, like, duh — it’s Enoch Powell.’ He is trying to recruit like-minded controversialists to protest against the EU on behalf of Geert Wilders. Nobody seems interested. ‘Come on …Come on,’ he urges, as rivers of sweat slosh down his face. All around him, in the exhibition hall, is a panoply of bizarre right-wing Americana. Somebody hands out fliers saying ‘Fight Leftist Scum!’; a man dressed as a policeman marches around in a T-shirt that reads, ‘Cops Say Legalize Drugs: Ask Me Why’; a bunch of pretty girls, in very short skirts and thick make-up, stand around discussing traditional family values. Welcome to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the beating heart of Republican America, the annual conference where college activists, members of Congress and celebrities from across the United States gather to discuss their party’s future.
The advent of Obama does not seem to have made anyone here more reasonable. One man pulls me aside and whispers: ‘I don’t think you realise that Islam is a Spartan religion. Mohammed chopped up bits from Spartan texts and put them together …and he went and called it a religion.’ People manning the promotional stalls are determinedly unabashed by their unfashionable views. One group announces, in bold font, that ‘It’s OK to be Ex-Gay’. I catch snippets of political discourse: ‘Well it’s clear, to me anyway, that Barack Obama is the real fascist,’ says one punter. ‘Thank you!’ shouts another man in reply.
At the far end of the hall, youngsters queue up to have their photographs taken with Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber. Joe has become a sort of all-purpose celebrity of the Right ever since he questioned Obama on the effect of his tax plans on small businesses in 2008. He recently worked as a war correspondent in Gaza for Pajamas Media. He is at CPAC to promote his book, Fighting for the American Dream, and to be a panellist in a debate called ‘Conservatism 2.0’.
Upstairs, former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich enters the Regency Ballroom to the tune of ‘Eye of the Tiger.’ The smashing guitar chords send the crowd into delirium. Gingrich walks in from the rear of the room. He is mobbed. A kind-faced old lady laughs and claps. ‘You tell ’em, Newt,’ she shouts. It’s easy to scoff at all this — and it’s fun, too. A significant number are here for precisely that purpose. For years Washington journalists, from the Left and Right, have come to CPAC in order to write snarky reports about the moribund state of American conservatism. In 1997, Stephen Glass wrote a ridiculously overblown story entitled ‘Spring Breakdown’ for the New Republic, in which he claimed to have witnessed pot-smoking and inebriated right-wingers attempt group sex with the fattest woman they could find. ‘This is the face of young conservatism,’ he wrote, ‘pissed off and pissed; dejected, depressed, drunk and dumb.’
It later emerged that Glass was a fantasist and a fake. Yet most readers believed him, not just because he tapped into well-established anti-Republican prejudices, but because in his fiction Glass had conveyed a certain truth. CPAC is bonkers. The reality, though, is more complicated than the New Republic’s fictitious sneering. For all its disorientating kookiness, CPAC is, and has long been, an important fixture in the American political calendar. The event has glorious and impressive mystique: it was here, in the 1970s and 80s, that Ronald Reagan often galvanised the ascending conservative movement. The administration of George W. Bush also regularly employed CPAC to its electoral advantage.
Here lies the key to the conference’s success: the abundant lunacy and the super-kitsch patriotism somehow blend into high-level politics. One moment you can be talking to a wild-eyed coot about how ‘communism and liberalism are the same damn thing’, the next you might be shaking hands with a serious presidential candidate — and your conversation needn’t be that different.
The essence of CPAC is to make Middle American radicals, however peculiar they may be, look and feel as if they have a stake in the establishment. In return, big-name Republicans can boost their populist bona fides. Speakers are guaranteed a cheer if they refer to ‘God’ or ‘Reagan’, ‘freedom’ or ‘America’, while words such as ‘socialism’ or ‘European’, ‘Nancy’ or ‘Pelosi’ are sure to elicit a hearty boo.
Where else would a 13-year-old be invited to lecture senior members of the Grand Old Party on conservative principles? ‘I want the American people to understand,’ says Jonathan Krohn, a home-schooler from Atlanta, waving his hands in the manner of a frustrated intellectual, ‘conservatism is not an ideology of feelings, or romanticism as some people like to say; it is an ideology of protecting the people and the people’s rights.’ After his oration, Krohn goes downstairs to sign copies of his new book, Define Conservatism: Past, Future, and Present.
Little Johnny isn’t the only one grappling with the intricacies of conservative philosophy. After the failures of George W. Bush and the Democratic victories of last November, the people of the Right are riddled with introspection. The 8,000 CPACers of 2009 don’t just want their habitual fix of liberal bashing; suddenly they want to be told what conservatism is all about.
GOP veterans point to certain changes in the atmosphere. Nobody, for instance, pretends that Bush II is a hero any more. And there’s a growing enthusiasm for Ron Paul, the 73-year-old maverick congressman from Texas. In 2008, Dr Paul, a strict fiscal and anti-war conservative then running for president, was largely dismissed by the CPAC faithful as a good-natured crank. He was even booed when he criticised the war on terror. This year, however, it is hard to look anywhere without seeing a group of his supporters in their red ‘Campaign for Liberty’ T-shirts.
It’s still not clear, though, that everyone entirely understands Dr Paul’s message. The crowd roars him on as he attacks President Barack Obama’s multi-trillion-dollar stimulus plans and the big-government programmes of the Bush years, but they don’t exactly follow him on foreign policy. When, for example, Paul says, ‘We went to get rid of a bad guy in Iraq. We did. But …one million Iraqis got killed,’ a section of the audience starts clapping their approval. ‘Believe me, they weren’t all terrorists,’ insists the Texan congressman. His listeners fall quiet, evidently disturbed.
They are more enthusiastic about the next high-profile speaker, Mitt Romney — another failed presidential candidate, but one who is happy to talk tough about ‘America’s enemies’. He makes aggressive noises against Iran and Russia, much to the delight of the assembled. It later emerges that, for the third year running, Romney had won CPAC’s straw poll on who should be the next Republican presidential nominee. Ron Paul’s revolutionaries leave the Omni Shoreham disappointed.
Outside, I bump into a bald man smoking. It’s Joe the Plumber. He looks exhausted. I scrounge a cigarette from him and we stand together puffing away. I ask him what the future holds. ‘I think I am going to take on the IRS,’ he says. ‘If not, I guess I go back to doing what I was doing.’ A young conference attendee approaches us, breathless with excitement, and asks for Joe’s opinion on the best way of reforming American democracy. Joe listens patiently to the boy’s ambitious schemes. He cracks an avuncular smile, puts out his cigarette, and says: ‘I’ll have to think about that and get back to you.’ With that, he shuffles back towards the hotel, perhaps to sort out the Republican party, or maybe just to fix a lavatory.
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