Blogging CPAC: Conservative Roadkill
CPAC 2008 CHAPTER ONE: Initial Impressions
I’m not much into omens, but the first visual indication I had prognosticating the outcome of CPAC was laying in the gutter at the corner of 24th and Calvert NW.
Last year at CPAC, the Washington Times used their CPAC Day One front page to lambast John McCain for being too chicken to show at CPAC. This year, their front page story suggests that he needs to woo the right.
While CPAC hasn’t officially started yet, there are already a lot of people here and the hustle and bustle of GOP presidential politics is in the air. I walked across the Exhibit Hall looking for some friends to store my laptop for me, and decided check out the Conservatives for John McCain booth.
Guess what? Despite the fact that hundreds and hundreds of people are here already, I couldn’t find a single McCain conservative. As a matter of fact, their booth was empty, as the picture below (click to enlarge) depicts. If I find a McCain conservative at CPAC, I’ll try to interview him or her. As these are hot button topics for me, I’ll be curious about the McCainian “conservative” defense of McCain-Feingold, as well has his refusal to sign Grover Norquist’s pledge.
UPDATE: I did just find a conservative McCain—but it was a McCain of a different order. This McCain was Robert Stacy McCain of the Washington Times, a man who actually likes to cut taxes and spending and despises First Amendment restrictions.
If CPAC participants and leadership end up responding responding to McCain positively, perhaps they should change the name of their future conferences to NeoPAC.
February 7th, 2008 at 11:50 am
McCain’s doing fine without having to woo anybody. You either accept him or you don’t. It’s that simple. What scare these so-called conservatives (in reality they’re right-wing social democrats) is the fact McCain may very well NOT try to woo them to his side, which would make them pretty impotent in this whole process.
February 7th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Not all of us believe that McCain is the “great American hero”; but most will agree that he manages to speak in a decidedly non-politician (not non-political) manner. Sometimes this translates into appearing like a genuine, independent-minded political maverick; other times he just looks like a buffoon – “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” comes to mind all too often.
Yet, there is about him which resonates with voters who are tired of the starched, messaged and massaged suits which seem cut from the same country-club, pricey-lunch GOP lobbyist crowd. He comes across as authentic, even when his demeanor is like someone’s old uncle who had to put on a suit for a niece’s wedding, but otherwise spends his time fixing his boat engine in the backyard. It’s that look, feel, taste and smell which has made him far less offensive to the general populace, even when his positions are as reactionary as Trent Lott or the late Strom Thurmond, or as warlike as Gammal Abdul Nasser.
Yet, he is now being called upon to pronounce his fealty to the supposed ghosts of Reagan, and proclaim allegiance to the orthodoxy of the “conservative” or radical-right agenda on issues from guns to RU-486, from Iran to Alito, and from Roe v. Wade to the beauty and righteousness of waterboarding.
All would be understandable if McCain were standing at the gates of heaven and confessing his sins in anticipation of some post-death redemption. He could then renounce the Satans of bipartisanship and independence of thought and be accepted to the Pantheons of the righteously anointed. But he is doing this at a time when he is being sent out to battle in a fight for the minds and souls of sinners and non-believers. Do these lunatics of the right expect him to carry on this war of thought while standing naked on the battlefield, stripped forever of the one quality – independence – that has kept him in the fight.
Harry and Nancy, Hillary and Barak, and the Lord Howard of Dean will be watching every gesture, memorizing every word, and dissecting every phrase that is delivered for CPAC. And then they’ll put together the TV ads. The flip-flop on immigration; the inconsistent positions on stem-cells; the backsliding on the environment; tax cuts; waterboarding; etc., etc, ad nauseum.
They won’t need talking points; they won’t need slick campaign demographics; all they need is one debate, one Dukakis moment:
“Senator McCain, if your granddaughter were raped by a gang of escaped convicts and became pregnant, would you criminalize and incarcerate the medical professionals who terminated her pregnancy”?
And then he’ll be just another Bob Dole. Truly, this is no country for old men.