The Conservative Soldier

Reporting from the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington:

Anticipation of Saturday’s late afternoon appearance by Rush Limbaugh to close out CPAC 2009 began first thing this morning and, by midday, attendees were essentially faced with a choice — keep your seat in the Shoreham Hotel’s Regency Ballroom for the duration, or risk viewing El Rushbo’s remarks on a monitor from spillover seating down the hall.

This is the what you might the call the perfect Conservative storm. Rush blowing in from the south, converging with nearly 9,000 registered CPACers in a ballroom at near-maximum capacity, in a moment when nothing short of a religious experience is adequate to calm the apprehensions of Conservatives young and less young.

Author Ann Coulter also drew a full house around the lunch hour. It was telling that her humorous verbal arrows, while well received, did not have the audience actually rolling in the aisles in side splitting ecstasy. The material was not the problem. It just seems all too apparent that most fervently patriotic Americans are shell shocked by the rapid deployment of B. Hussein Obama’s destructive economic and social marching orders, and terrified to think too far beyond tomorrow.

(Among Coulter’s best lines: “The media tell us Obama is the Second Coming, but his policies seem to ensure there won’t be a second term coming.”)

My vote for the day’s top speaker amid the Countdown to Rush goes to former Reagan cabinet member Bill Bennett, radio talk host, former Secretary of Education and recent author of a comprehensive history tome, “America: The Last Best Hope”.

Bennett brought a no-frills, raspy voiced, rumpled sensibility to Day 3, and his message is one to embrace tomorrow, next week and throughout the year to come:

“Things looked dire, looked worse, in 1974,” said Bennett, referencing the year of Nixon’s demise, stock market stagnancy and the debut of CPAC. “And in 1978, ‘79, at the end of Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, things looked dire, too.”

Then, Bennett issued his rules for the road ahead. I’d clip and save these.

1. Understand reality. Obama is an appealing politician. And he is not likely to make the stupid mistakes associated with the Clinton years.

2. Obama will not wreck the country. As Conservatives, we gain nothing by predicting that these are the “end of days”. No one individual can wreck the country. We have feared this in our past, and it has proven to be misguided.

3. Watch our rhetoric. We are NOT seeing the rise of Socialism. (Bennett was the only speaker over the three days who rejected this charge). We’re seeing the resurgence of a Democrat Left Wing Catechism. In other words, unsettling, but not unexpected.

4. Conservatives have talent. “I can’t remember a time when we’ve had a better bench.” He named Jindal, Pawlenty, Sanford, et al. “We had no bench like this in 1979 (when Reagan stepped up).”

5. Never underestimate the American capacity for self-renewal. “It is not dark, or dusk in America,” Bennett said. “It is MORNING in America.”

Optimism. Realism. Conservatism. Morning.

Any questions?

Reporting from the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington:

The magnitude of the Obama Era’s threat to the future of America was confronted head on this morning at CPAC 2009.

“Americans have lost the knowledge and understanding of what freedom is,” said South Carolina’s charismatic Sen. Jim DeMint.

He called President B. Hussein Obama “the world’s best salesman of Socialism”, but leveled blame on both political parties for their failures to present adequate choices to American voters during the past decade, failures that opened the doors to Obama’s radical liberal extremism.

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio echoed a similar theme, calling the Obama-led stimulus and other multitrillion-dollar spending “a downpayment on a Socialist experiment” by a President “seeking to replace economic freedom” with government domination.

The speaker who attracted by far the largest audience in two days of CPAC events, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, challenged Attorney General Eric Holder to defend his charges that Americans are cowards on the subject of race. He invited Holder to join him in Detroit’s worst neighborhoods to engage in “a dialog” on the ways in which unions and bad governance have eroded Detroit and left its poor even worse off than ever before.

“Anywhere, any time,” Gingrich said.

The overriding theme of the former Speaker’s remarks, however, was the absolute necessity of repositioning Conservatism as a movement of inclusion in the manner of President Reagan, who always reached out to “Democrats, having been once one himself, independents and Republicans” every chance he got.

“We will not achieve (growth) as an opposition movement,” Gingrich said. “The great irony (today) is that we now have a Bush-Obama big spending policy.” He urged Conservatives to rally around their party as one that is “a party of the American people, the party that grew out of CPAC (in the 1970s).”

And Gingrich challenged CPAC’s attendees and Americans everywhere to reject Washington lawmakers who vote for massive spending bills without bothering, even trying, to read and understand them beforehand.

“Every person who voted that way,” he said, “deserves to be defeated (for re-election),” regardless of party.

Reporting from the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington:

The “leader board” after Day 1 of CPAC 2009 on Thursday is populated by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), a young patriot the nation will embrace in years to come, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), who is a riveting speaker, the wry and authoritative John Bolton, and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, an advocate of fair election practices stemming from the fury in Ohio on Election Night 2000, and beyond.

There is a sense of urgency and a tug of destiny among these patriotic conservatives. In these horrific times, optimism is bubbling. The Obama opportunists underestimate these tremors of unrest at their peril.

To open CPAC, American Conservative Union president David Keene noted record attendance, now north of 8,500. The attendees I’ve met personally are here from Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Utah, to name a few. At the first CPAC in 1973, 125 registrants, mostly from “inside the Beltway”, gathered to hear the keynote speaker — a former Governor named Ronald Reagan.

This week’s swarm of enthusiastic attendees is half comprised of engaging, optimistic college students. Very encouraging, to say the least. Today’s CPAC also attracts 90 co-sponsoring organizations.

Highlights on Day 1 from the historic Omni Shoreham Hotel:

Paul Ryan, 38, is a gifted and forceful speaker, both eloquent and entertaining. His home run line today was that “without enduring (Conservative) principals, we get change but no direction.”

Ryan urged Conservatives not to “erect roadblocks” merely to deter the Obama administration but to “create roadmaps” that can lead our nation away from the Marxist threat we face in 2009.

Learn more about Ryan’s vision at AmericanRoadmap.org.

No one was on top of his game more than the former U.S. representative to the United Nations, John Bolton, who used his dry one-liners and searing criticism — both of Presidents Bush and Obama — to inspire repeated applause and cheers from audience of more than 8,000 attendees.

“The (global) challenges we face may be more than this (Obama) administration can handle,” Bolton said. “But the good news is, if (Conservatives) get our acts together, he is a one-termer!”

Bolton wasn’t through. “On foreign policy, I don’t think President Obama thinks it’s a priority. … (But) a threat to the safety of any American is a threat to our nation. A President who doesn’t understand that has a lot to learn.”

Turning to Iran, Bolton acknowledged that there are unfortunate parallels between Bush and Obama on the refusal of the United States to confront Iran’s military and nuclear ambitions.

Iran’s determination to develop weapons of mass destruction is not motivated “by an abstract interest in astrophysics,” he said. Bolton fears future military responses to Iran will be left to Israel because “you can count on (the Obama administration) NOT to use force against Iran.”

Ohio’s Blackwell appeared on a panel entitled, “Al Franken and ACORN: How Liberals are Destroying the American Election System”. If the public tuned into even half of what has been done and is on tap to hijack the integrity of free elections, there would be revolt that would cross party lines.

Putting aside spending he proposes, President B. Hussein Obama is leading “the greatest realignment of political power … ever witnessed,” pointing to liberal agendas on six fronts: “card check” intrusions on union workers; censorship of talk radio and other mediums; blanket amnesty proposals for 12 million+ illegal immigrants; universal same-day voter registration; the packing of federal courts with liberal activist judges at the appellate level; and the hijacking of the U.S. Census.

“Taken collectively, you can begin to see the game plan,” Blackwell said. “It is a battle of the nature of the relationship to our government as individuals, and the nature of our culture. This is a battle cry.”

Indiana’s charismatic Congressman Pence crystallized the undeterred resolve of the thousands who converged on the largest CPAC in history.

“We are on the brink of a great American awakening,” Pence said. “And it will be Conservatives who will lead it. Beginning right here (in 2009).”