Washington, D.C. — As bleary-eyed reporters settled into the press pen on the mezzanine level of the Marriott Wardman Park early Thursday, black coffees and laptops in hand, the grand ballroom of the sprawling hotel in northwest Washington was already a bustling spectacle. Tea Party grandmas, red-faced students, and suited politicos laughed and marked seats with overcoats; activists congregated. Clumps of crowd, segregated by the stickers and pins they wore — Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation, College Republicans — dotted the room. One battalion unfurled Gadsden flags, folding them neatly upon their laps, waiting for the right moment to wave; another brought out plastic bags stuffed with crackers and candy — munching up for the long day ahead. I saw two young men with Mitt Romney pins; I saw at least ten who wore stickers announcing their affection for Gary Johnson, the pot-smoking former governor of New Mexico.
Outside of the cavernous, carpeted hangar, groups of the Right set up shop, advertising their DVDs, pamphlets, and liberty-loving products. Top-40 tunes and lighthearted country blasted from the speakers. It was a bazaar, a festival, a revival — and it was only 9 a.m.
Up first was David Keene, the outgoing chairman of the American Conservative Union and a former Nixon aide, who bears a striking resemblance to the late Jack Kemp. After a few welcoming remarks, the silver-haired Keene, with a big smile, introduced the day’s first headliner — Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a former tax attorney best known for irking the primetime lineup at MSNBC. Bachmann, decked in a bright blue suit, took the stage to cheers. Upon reaching the podium, she paused, and with perfect comedic timing, told the crowd to “wait a minute, since someone told me that I needed to find the right camera.”
The crowd roared. Last month, Bachmann, the founder of the House’s Tea Party Caucus, gave her own rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union — a low-budget, Wayne’s World–style broadcast that was filmed by the Tea Party Express and CNN, and in which Bachmann faced the Tea Party group’s camera instead of the cable network’s. Bachmann was promptly skewered by NBC’s Saturday Night Live and Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.
Nonetheless, her audience — full of devotees, some clad in “Bachmann 2012” T-shirts — was ready to embrace her. “Okay,” she laughed softly, her eyes scanning the sprawling sea of chairs. Quickly, her gaze fell upon the TV crews roosted in the back. “All of you SNL fans, I know where it is, I think we’re good to go.”
Turning to her text, Bachmann went straight for the heartstrings, declaring, “I am one of you.” She heaped praise on the assembled for “getting off of the couch” during the 2010 midterms and, if it was their first dabble into politics, for “joining the family.” But after ten minutes of kind words and recap, Bachmann, a potential 2012 presidential contender — she traveled to Iowa recently — began to outline her policy positions. While she didn’t announce a run, she didn’t seem too interested in swatting away such speculation. She urged the thousands before her to “win the Triple Crown of 2012, which is holding on to the House of Representatives, winning a conservative Senate and — oh yeah, baby – winning the White House.”
Bachmann played up the country’s growing unease about its debt to China. “You may know that the president of China is named Hu,” she sighed. “Hu’s your daddy.” Without naming names, she wagged a finger at Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, a fiscal hawk who last year called for Republicans to have a “truce” on social issues. “I strongly disagree that that is all there is,” she said. “And I believe most conservatives agree with that as well.” Her politics, she underlined, are a mix of robust social, national-security, and economic conservatism.
But it wasn’t all policy talk. Bachmann served up juicy cuts of red meat near the end, when she went on a soaring riff about Obamacare. The president, she warned, has ushered in socialism over the past two years, with his health-care law its “crown jewel.” Repealing that monstrosity, she said, is the “driving motivation of my life. The first political breath I take every morning is to repeal Obamacare.” The crowd, on cue, went wild. Bachmann wrapped with an invitation for college students to attend an open-bar reception later that evening. “One drink limit!” she chuckled, as mothers nodded.
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the Oshkosh businessman who toppled former senator Russ Feingold in November, was next. Rodney Atkin’s “It’s America,” which celebrates high-school proms, Springsteen songs, and Chevrolets, blared as he approached. Bachmann, Johnson noted, a bit nervously, got the crowd “fired up” and was a “hard act to follow.” But he plowed ahead.
“Now I realize many — if not most — of you had no idea who I was prior to November 2 — or even five minutes ago for that matter,” Johnson said playfully. He then went into great detail about why he ran for Senate last year — his first-ever run for elected office.
“I’m 55 years old,” Johnson said. “I grew up in an America that valued hard work, and that celebrated success. Remember that? Remember when we used to tell our kids to look up to doctors and other successful people, emulate them, study hard, work hard? This is America. You can be anything you want to be. There are no limits. Now, some are demonizing success.”
The crowd dug it, especially since Johnson has the distinct talent of never sounding like a pol. His persona is more the mild-mannered NASCAR dad slightly surprised to find himself inside the Beltway for the first time. “What I have sadly witnessed over the course of my lifetime is a slow but steady drift — and I would argue over the last two years, a lurch – toward a culture of entitlement and dependency. This is not an America I recognize,” he said. “It is not an America that will work.”
Another freshman GOP senator, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, was next. Toomey, who is known as a number-crunching banker, offered up plenty of policy questions and personal anecdotes. For the former House member — who famously challenged Arlen Specter in the Keystone State’s 2004 Republican Senate primary, only to lose by a hair — it was a reintroduction of sorts to the national community of conservatives.
Toomey recalled those heady days in his opening, observing how Specter, a moderate, had been “squandering” the GOP’s mandate by not following small-government principles. “Republicans were in danger of losing their way,” he said. “While Senator Specter won more votes that night,” more than six years later, it’s clear, he said, that conservatives have “won the battle of ideas.”
Toomey’s speech, unlike Bachmann’s, was hardly a rallying cry. In fact, Toomey went out of his way to lower expectations, saying outright that he did not want people to get the wrong idea about his extemporaneous flair. His daughter’s friend, he smiled, once called him the “worst” speaker — ever — after he robotically spoke to the seven-year-olds about his work at the Club for Growth, a free-market advocacy group. “Don’t listen to a word she says,” his daughter replied. “She just repeats whatever all the other kids are saying.”
Nevertheless, Toomey won the morning when he began to describe his childhood, sharing the story of his father, Patrick Joseph Toomey, who grew up with an “Irish brogue, in an immigrant family, in an Irish ghetto in Providence, Rhode Island.” Growing up, he said, his father never imagined that one day his son would become a member of the greatest legislative body in the world. “But this is America,” Toomey said, as applause filled the ballroom. “This is America and there are no limits to what we can aspire to.” The CPAC crowd loved it.
After Toomey’s quiet but stirring ruminations, another rock star took the stage. Rep. Kristi Noem, the stunning freshman representative from South Dakota, who has already assumed a leadership post in the House, approached the podium to the rollicking licks of Van Halen’s “Right Now.” While many appeared to be unfamiliar with Noem, they certainly perked up as Eddie Van Halen hit the chorus and the Dakotan hit the spotlight.
“Well you all look good,” Noem began. “And you sound a little wound up, too.” In the following 16 minutes, she ably described the challenges ahead for the merry band of GOP freshmen, who are grappling with the country’s serious fiscal problems. On a lighter note, she shrugged off concerns that the class does not “get” how Washington works. Her class, she said, wants to deliver “historic results,” period. “A lot of us freshmen don’t have a whole lot of knowledge, necessarily, about the way that Washington, D.C., operates. And frankly, we don’t really care.”
As one might expect, this went over swimmingly. And to her credit, Noem was low-key throughout, playing up her conservatism and turning down the volume about herself.
Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, whose volume is usually set to low, was more upbeat than usual during his noon speech. After an introduction by tax-cut guru Grover Norquist, McConnell began by noting that Washington has undergone a “rather bizarre transformation” in recent days: “Olbermann is out and Reagan is in.”
“I mean, you can’t turn on C-SPAN or cable news these days without hearing some liberal Democrat saying nice things about Ronald Reagan,” McConnell joked. “It’s a nice development, don’t you think?” Indeed.
McConnell’s key moment came when he turned to Obamacare, which he pledged to keep fighting. “According to the Constitution, nobody has the right to tell anyone they have to buy something,” he said. “That’s why Republicans will continue the fight until Obamacare goes the way of Hillarycare.” Next to me, two attendees applauded and said they’d hold McConnell, and the rest of congressional Republicans, to this pledge.
CPAC became a full-fledged pep rally when former House speaker Newt Gingrich appeared in the early afternoon. Boy, can he make an entrance. He rolled in to the sweet sounds of “Eye of the Tiger,” the pulsating, bass-heavy theme from Rocky III. Unlike other speakers, who emerged from behind the curtains, Gingrich reveled in making a long walk to the podium as the music played, shaking hands and giving thumbs-up to his supporters. Students clicked camera phones with the energy of Hollywood paparazzi.
Yet once he began his speech, Gingrich was a tad muted — focusing more on his energy-policy ideas than bombast. But he still had a scalpel for the Obama agenda. He slammed Time magazine for putting Obama on its cover alongside Ronald Reagan. “I hate to tell this to our friends at MSNBC and elsewhere: Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan,” he said, to cheers. He then issued a warning to Democrats: “2010 was the appetizer; 2012 is the entrée.”
The media-savvy former Georgia lawmaker also had strong words on Obama’s foreign policy on a day when Egypt was erupting. “The Obama administration is wrong on terrorism, wrong on Iran, wrong on Hezbollah, wrong on the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said.
After the speech, Gingrich told me that he wanted to offer policy proposals, especially on the energy front, as a way of showing that conservatives are looking for “replacement” ideas, not simply a way to disrupt things. In 2012, he confided, Republicans “must communicate to the American people a viable alternative” on the full slate of issues. “It will be competition over governing,” he said.
As the afternoon drifted on, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, a likely 2012 presidential candidate, gave an emotional tribute to American exceptionalism and the importance of social conservatism in the GOP fray. “Social issues, those are the issues that matter,” he said. As with Bachmann, he punched back at the idea of a social-issues “truce” for 2012. “Those are the issues we can’t retreat from,” he argued over the course of his 30-minute address.
Santorum also spent significant time on national security and foreign policy, two fronts he has focused on as a writer and speaker since leaving the Senate in 2007. He chided Obama for siding with the protestors in Egypt after being silent during 2009’s democratic protests in Iran. “When we turned our backs a year and half ago on Iran, there was a revolution,” he said. “Did he call for the current regime to step down? No.”
By 3 p.m., post-Santorum et al., the crowd was pumped up. But then CPAC, to its surprise, was injected with a Four Loko shot of adrenaline: The Hair was in the house. Donald Trump — billionaire, reality-show maestro, real-estate honcho — took the stage. Trump, who entered the hotel surrounded by hulking security guards, took control immediately. “You’re hired!” a fan screamed. “No, you’re hired,” Trump said, as the good-time soul music faded out.
Trump 2012? The Donald hinted that yes, it’s possible, and that he will decide by June. “These are my people,” he said to the CPAC audience, his hands open. His platform, should he run, would surely be about kickstarting the economy and kicking out Team Obama. “The United States has become the whipping post for the world,” he complained. “America today is missing quality leadership . . . the United States is becoming the laughingstock of the world.”
“I’ve beaten many people and companies, and I’ve won many wars,” Trump said, as a large American flag hovered behind him, Patton-style. “I have fairly, but intelligently, earned many billions of dollars, which in a sense, was a scorecard and acknowledgment of my ability.” This tack, he said, to laughs, is probably a “little different than what you’ve been hearing.”
Oh, it was. Trump, for all his showiness and crass celebrity, did pour a bucket of cold water onto the slightly sclerotic anti-Obamacare rants that had been building up, and festering, all day. But audience members, while loving the entertainment value, were not all swooning. It was just a decade ago that Trump was considering a presidential run on Ross Perot’s Reform Party ticket. Now he calls himself a pro-life, anti-gun-control, anti-Obamacare conservative.
While whoops for Trump’s vibrant speech were heard throughout, a vocal contingent had no time for the host of The Apprentice — the fans of Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the libertarian Republican who mounted an unsuccessful 2008 presidential run. “Ron Paul cannot get elected,” Trump said, after a few started yelling Paul’s name. The Paul backers fired right back, yelling at Trump to shove it. As Paulites grew incensed, other attendees cheered Trump’s assertion, and the crowd, if but for a minute, lost it, going back and forth, in inarticulate crows, about Paul.
Sen. Rand Paul, a freshman Republican from Kentucky — and Ron Paul’s son — was less colorful than Trump in his afternoon speech, but offered up his own stew of provocative ideas. Paul, who founded the Senate’s Tea Party Caucus and rode that movement to victory, outlined his budget plan, which would slash $500 billion.
Paul threw a zinger at House Republicans, who aim to cut much less. “They’re talking about cutting $35 billion,” he said, shaking his head. “We spend $35 billion in five days. We add $35 billion to the debt in nine days. It’s not enough, and we will not avoid financial ruin in our country if we do not think more boldly.” He then hit on the third rails of American politics. “We will have to have entitlement reform,” he said. “We will have to look long and hard at the military budget.”
If Trump was raucous, the late afternoon had more in store. Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared to receive an award for defending freedom, and was greeted with jeers and catcalls from some members of the audience related to his stewardship of the Iraq War during the Bush administration. Many Ron Paul supporters walked out.
Rumsfeld paid little attention to the scattered boos, but once his old friend, Vice President Dick Cheney, arrived as a surprise guest, the hecklers only grew louder. For a minute, supporters cheered “USA! USA!” as Cheney took the stage, while critics continued to yell. When the volume didn’t die down, Cheney leaned toward the microphone, and said, with that famous half-smile, “Alright, sit down and shut up.” He then gave a moving account of his early days in the Nixon White House, where he worked on Rumsfeld’s staff before both went on to senior positions in the Ford administration.
House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) soon showed up, entering to the romping guitar of a Tom Petty tune. The first thing he said was that he recognized that there were a lot of Ron Paul supporters there. Paul, he noted in a thrown bone, is a “big Green Bay Packers fan.” Mild applause ensued. Then Ryan, a leading budget hawk and rising GOP star, got down to business about the fiscal road ahead. The U.S., he warned, is at a “tipping point.”
“We have a conservative majority in the House of Representatives right now,” Ryan said. It is imperative, he urged, that this new majority pushes for an “opportunity” society. “All that stands between us today and abundance tomorrow is the burden of public debt, the government’s appetite to spend, and the bureaucrats’ passion to regulate,” he said. To this effect, he promised that next week’s GOP budget will cut more than promised in the “Pledge for America,” Republicans’ key 2010 campaign document.
As the afternoon faded into the evening, the conservative Woodstock quieted down, with many heading out to bars and cafés on Connecticut Avenue and in nearby Adams Morgan. Others stayed behind at the Marriott, where CPAC held a dinner for donors and friends. House speaker John Boehner delivered the keynote speech. As guests dined on Caesar salad, steak, and mashed potatoes, Boehner talked up his party’s promise to cut spending.
“The American people have directed us to cut spending,” Boehner said. “We will. And there’s no limit to the amount we’re willing to cut to help get our economy moving again. Let me be very clear about this: We are going to exceed our Pledge to America. We are going to cut $100 billion in discretionary spending next week. Write it down: $100 billion in discretionary spending. And we aren’t going to stop there.”
Boehner’s words were bold, his tone tough. But at CPAC 2011: Day One, it was simply par for the course.
— Robert Costa is a political reporter for National Review.