On Thursday, February 26, some 9,000 activists met in Washington D.C. at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (www.cpac.org). After losing the presidency and both houses of Congress, one might have thought rightwing Republicans would concentrate predominantly upon the widening worldwide recession. Yet, their agenda offered only an odd array of controversial speakers on less than urgent issues.
Would-be president Mike Huckabee came to sell his book Do the Right Thing. John Bolton, former anti-U.N. ambassador to the U.N., peddled Surrender is Not an Option, and Ann Coulter hawked Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America. “National Precinct Captain” Rush Limbaugh, who hopes our President will fail, was given thirty minutes to speak and then honored with the Defender of the Constitution Award.
Several speakers zeroed in on Al Franken and ACORN: How Liberals are destroying the American Election System.” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson attacked the Fairness Doctrine. Pat Buchanan’s divorced sister Bay, an expert on family values, pondered “The Future of the Conservative Movement,” while freshman Congressman Aaron Schock explained “The Keys to Victory.”
Alabama’s Senator Richard Shelby, who chaired the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs from 2003 to 2007, is less upset with the housing and banking crises than with America’s need to see President Obama’s birth certificate. Arizona’s Senator John McCain worries that the President’s Marine One costs taxpayers “an enormous amount of money."
Other conservative Republicans are focusing on gays, on pregnant women afflicted with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV), and on prolonged recounts of Senatorial election results. Many are stressing the urgent need to heed President Reagan’s famous warning that "Government is the problem."
Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele bemoans the Republicans’ main mistake: veering too far to the left. He also proposes retribution against the three Republican “Judases” who voted for Obama’s stimulus package: Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, and Maine’s Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe.
As a reaction to the conservatives’ confusion, California’s Governor Schwarzenegger made it known that he may leave the Republican fold. Jon Huntsman, the governor of Utah, America’s most consistently Republican state, was quoted as saying of the Republican Congressional leaders: "I don't listen or read whatever it is they say because it is inconsequential -- completely."
In view of the strong popular support President Obama presently enjoys, many conservative activists are attacking lesser luminaries. New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg was warned that he would have to be less liberal if he wanted conservatives to support his bid for a third term. Most conservatives despise Democrat Al Franken, not only because he seems to have won his challenge to Minnesota’s Senator Norm Coleman but also because he wrote a 336-page book entitled Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot.
Old-guard conservatives are back with old-guard advice. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was merely “disappointed” with Obama's Congressional address, but former Majority Leader Tom DeLay denounced it as "the most irresponsible, hypocritical speech I have ever witnessed."
Writing in the Washington Times, American Conservative Union chairman David Keene made one of the more sober assessments of the Republican Party’s present dilemma: "The remedy is not to abandon the values and beliefs that brought us into the political arena in the first place, but to do a better job organizing, communicating, reaching out to new voters and recruiting candidates who are in it for more than a job and the booty that goes with it.”