I’ve seen the future of conservatism at CPac – and it doesn’t work

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[/audioplayer]About the coolest guy I saw at CPac this year was this wild-eyed, middle–aged crazy wearing ‘statement’ spectacles, faded Levis and a badge on his immaculately cut, grey wool Timothy Everest suit-coat saying ‘2012 WTF?’ I was looking in the bathroom mirror at the time and the drugs were just starting to kick in. Not proper Hunter S. Thompson drugs, unfortunately. Just some imported Indian-made version of the anti-narcolepsy drug Modafinil, kind of a low-level, legal amphetamine, which I’d taken to ward off the effects of the truly Babylonian party at Breitbart’s Capitol Hill ‘Embassy’ HQ the night before…

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Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is not how cool I am, but how desperately, fantastically, magisterially uncool CPac is. CPac is the annual convention for American conservatives, held in a big conference hotel called the Gaylord in the Maryland riverside resort of National Harbor, about half an hour’s cab ride out of Washington DC. This is where you go to watch the future of conservatism. Well, I’ve seen it — and it isn’t working.

And it gives me no pleasure to say that, by the way. After two terms of Obama, the US is going to need a restorative shot of red-blooded conservatism at least as badly as Britain did (and failed to get) after the years of Blair and Brown. What I can’t see at the moment, though, is where it is going to get it.

Nor could anyone at CPac. The only keynote speaker who totally raised the roof was Sarah Palin, at the end. But that may be because, unlike the other headlining acts (Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, etc), she has the advantage of not currently being a politician angling for the presidency.