The CPAC Diary: How I Survived the Longest Weekend of My Life

Spring Break comes early for our CPAC correspondent as he leaves the real world and takes a journey through the deep jungles of conservatism.

By Marcus Mrowka, George Washington University

There are some places I never thought I’d be in my lifetime, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) certainly being one of them. But there I was on a mild winter morning last week, ascending the escalator from the metro to the Ronald Reagan Building for the 32nd annual CPAC. Why a group that supposedly hates anything resembling big government would have their conference in the largest federal building in Washington is beyond me. Why they named the largest federal building in Washington after a man who once said government was the enemy is also hard to understand.

After navigating a maze of hallways, atriums and offices, I hit the conference. It resembled a large trade show with exhibits and rooms and giveaway prizes. The center atrium was constructed into a mini-metropolis of booths representing every conservative interest imaginable. From Students for Academic Freedom to Americans for Tax Reform, it was a virtual who’s who of conservatism. At the booths, attendees could gather enough free handouts, books, stickers and other paper products to stretch across one of those big boxy red states twice over.

In the nearby merchandise room, you could buy Condi 08 buttons or sweaters that read “Capitalist Pig.” This room also held the book signings. Conservatives love book signings. 9:00am book signings, lunch time book signings, midnight book signings, they just can’t get enough.

On the other side of the atrium was where all the action happened. This was the event room with seating for at least 1000 people. A stage lined with American flags ran across the front, flanked on either side by two huge projection screens. The media lined the back of the room, and the conference attendees packed themselves wherever they could.

Day 1

The first morning I spent 20 minutes trying to find where the student check-in was, only to realize that my search was unnecessary as anyone could seemingly walk in and out of the entire conference without having their badge checked and without paying a dime. I entered the main event room and took a seat between two men wearing flag ties. I have never been surrounded by so many conservatives in my entire life. Old ones, young ones, male ones, females ones – but the diversity ended there, 99% of them were white. I tried to imagine how the audience would be different if this were the Progressive Political Action Conference. At PPAC there would be fewer flag ties, no cowboy hats, no fur, fewer blue blazers with gold buttons, no bowties, fewer stiffly sprayed 80s bangs, and a lot more women and people of color.

My morning started out with a double header of “2004: How the Good Guys Won” followed by “2004: How the Bad Guys Tried to Stop Us and How We Can Guard Against Future Cheating.” These two panels set the tone for the rest of the conference.

The rest of the day featured a lot of slamming upon old media and the threadbare “liberal elites” took a lot of blame from people like Michael Barone of U.S. News and World Report and Kayne Robinson of the NRA. They demonized CBS, NBC and ABC, calling them evil to great applause.

Later Ryan Ellis of the apparently facetiously named Alliance for Worker Freedom told the audience that “we need to remember that unions are our biggest threat.” Mark Mix from the National Right to Work Foundation wants to stop union members from paying dues. Any mention of organized labor drew hisses from people around me. This was the closest the conference came to an honest discussion of class and economics. Awesome.

The next panelist, Cleta Mitchell, from the law firm of Foley and Lardner, introduced me to something I dub “conservative cannibalism.” Mitchell, a petite woman with a southern drawl was one of just 15 female speakers at CPAC out of 169. She attacked conservatives like Sen. John McCain and Rep. Chris Shays, portraying them as liberals who were trying to “muzzle” true conservatives.

“When John McCain says ‘I have an idea,’ we should all start trembling,” she told the audience. This was mainly for his support of campaign finance legislation, which she said was “funded by the left,” and also because of his bipartisan work on other legislation. The conservative cannibalism theme would continue throughout the convention with attacks on the “Hagel-Snowe-Whitman-McCain” wing of conservatives.

The audience had been noticeably riled up by the panel and were hungry for another dose of crazy. That’s when everyone’s favorite family man Sen. Rick Santorum took to the stage to a standing ovation. A couple behind me talked about how he will make such a great president one day. The great defender of traditionalism was there to talk about the traditional family.

Santorum was trying to make the case that fiscal conservatives should favor a ban on same-sex marriage. He argues that where there is marriage between one man and one woman there was freedom and “if we say marriage is whatever you want it to be to whoever you want it to be then it losses its intrinsic value.”

He argued that, “Where marriage does not exist there are great levels of poverty….and the predominant helper is the government.”

So just to summarize a more long-winded speech, instead of having the government help its citizens get out of poverty, the government should just help men marry women and that will solve all of the problems. Rock on Mr. Santorum!

I finally reached my breaking point when Karl Rove took to the stage to speak to a packed house. The room was so filled that I had to watch his speech from the atrium on a closed circuit feed. The speech, received with great cheers, gave the typical conservative pep talk. He called the conservative base “broad and inclusive” and boasted that “President Bush received more votes than any candidate in American history.” He left out the fact that there were only a handful of minorities in the room and more Americans voted against Bush in 2004 than any other president in American history as well.
I was gasping for air by this point, so I took a break from CPAC before returning for the Presidential Banquet featuring Vice-President Cheney. Upon my return, I took my seat in the corner of the banquet hall with the other students.

I quickly realized I was sitting next to another reporter. We had the same pad and pen and exchanged pleasantries. She said she felt a bit like Stephen Glass which immediately tipped me off – she was another liberal mole inside CPAC. To my left was the classic socially awkward conservative. The white socks with his black suit, the fumbling of his wine glass.

But Mr. Socially Awkward had nothing on the Neanderthal with the cowboy hat and fake southern accent. He was really from Massachusetts but he put on the act because “chicks dig it.” He was quite proud of the fact that two pieces he submitted to his school newspaper were rejected and labeled as “hate speech.” So proud in fact, he framed one of the rejection letters.

Next to the Neanderthal sat a rather normal, intelligent guy. Well-dressed and well-mannered. He started a Republican group on his campus. Rounding out the table were three conservative girls, the quiet one, the ditzy one and the one with enough makeup on for all three.

Dinner was rather uneventful, the steak bloody and the conversation dull. The audience cheered at the abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol and the rejection of the International Criminal Court. Cheney gave a speech that was nearly identical to the one Rove had given a day earlier.

But when Rep. Chris Cox took to the mic, my ears perked up. The Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee told the audience, “We continue to find chemical and biological weapons [in Iraq].” How many times can conservatives really get away with this lie?

Day 2

Pat Buchanan kicked the day off with a speech again congratulating the rest of the conservatives for the achievements that were made despite the world working against them. The rest of his speech railed against the “liberal press,” “liberal academia,” the “liberal wing” of the conservative movement, and against communism, because Pat is still fighting the Cold War.

“[Communism] will be dead one day in Cuba and in North Vietnam and in China and after this we move on the final bastions of Marxism-Leninism at Harvard and Berkeley,” Buchanan said to great applause.

I was surprised to learn that Buchanan and I were both against the No Child Left Behind Act. But he wasn’t against it because it is a bad law, he’s against it because he wants to get rid of the Department of Education all together as well as abolish and fumigate the National Endowment for the Arts.

It was all so unreal, I kept expecting a flock of baby unicorns to trot across the stage. But I stayed in my seat, calmly suppressing my anger at the grouchy old white man on stage.

Next, the kids hopped on a bus, grabbed some free lunch and headed over to the Hart Senate Office Building. The group was going to visit Senator Specter’s office to urge him to stop “obstruction” of judges and I tagged along. Entering Hart, there was visible disgust amongst the CPAC-ers with the giant Calder sculpture in the middle of the building. The unanimous consensus was that it was a “monument to wasted spending.” They didn’t know it was put there by a Republican Senator who had managed the Capital Art Foundation.

Specter’s Chief of Staff met with the 30 of us in a crowded conference room. Our leader told the Chief of Staff that we wanted these judicial nominees to go through and he reassured us all that Sen. Specter intended to make sure it happens. The rest of the chat focused on intimidating Democrats into agreeing to a vote or else face being “Daschlized” as CPAC-ers like to call it.

The good news from our field trip to the Hill was that we were back in time for the highlight of the conference, Ann Coulter. Again the room had been filed to capacity, even the closed circuit television room was packed. All the young people who had been out surveying the city and ignoring the conference suddenly converged to see Coulter’s routine.

She took to the stage with a standing ovation and wasted no time attacking “evil liberals” like Sen. Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy as well as the usual Clinton trashing. But Coulter reached a new level when she called for a “new McCarthyism” against college professors and told the audience they should “oppress” liberals.

“Liberals like to scream and howl about McCarthyism, I say let’s give them some. They’ve had intellectual terror on campus for years…it’s time for a new McCarthyism,” she said.

I began to feel nauseated, so I took a breather from the alternate universe I had been exposed to all day. I didn’t return until later in the evening to go to a party at the J.W. Marriott being thrown by a candidate for College Republican National President. A team of people had been handing out fliers advertising the free bar for two days and word had definitely spread.

I got to the party about 45 minutes after it began, and the room was packed with young conservatives, 85 percent of whom I am betting were not old enough to be taking advantage of the free bar. After waiting close to a half hour for a drink and listening to people talk about how much they loved George Bush and Ronald Reagan, I went to the lobby to read up on this Davidson kid who we were feting. He had signs, stickers, a bio and a plan of action for the College Republicans. This kid was loaded to afford all this and that’s about all I figured out before people began to trickle out. I quickly made my exit, taking one final swig of my watery drink.

Day 3

The final day of CPAC and the first real disagreement between the conservatives present came on Saturday morning during a panel on immigration. None of the panelists cared for Bush’s immigration plan, but they disagreed on what to do about the problem. A person from the audience suggested the death penalty for every illegal immigrant caught. That idea was brushed off by the panel but got a few too many claps for comfort from the audience. The panel ended with no real consensus – I’ll just have to wait till next year.

My CPAC experience culminated with a student panel on “Battling the Left in Its Privileged Sanctuaries.” It featured students from Ball State, Bucknell and Roger Williams and a moderator who told the crowd “the hate America first crowd always wins.” The students shared strategies like using threats, media campaigns, protests or wielding the financial clout of alumni to get conservative demands met.

One student, Jason Mattera, told the audience he got a dean fired for not answering his calls to bring a right-wing speaker to campus. Thereafter he got elected as finance chair of his student government and quickly gave his own conservative group the most money of any group on campus.

And with that, CPAC ended and I returned to earth unscathed. CPAC can be very depressing for a progressive. The constant broadcasting of three days worth of conservative cheerleading and distortions takes a toll. I wanted to take a shower. I wanted to go recycle something. I wanted to marry a gay couple. I wanted to cooperate with our NATO allies. Anything that would get me back to the real world and away from the longest weekend of my life.

Illustration: Matt Bors