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.
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