Minnesotans for Limited Government is a conservative political action committee that favors smaller government and supports Ron Paul for president. It came out against the GOP-backed anti–gay marriage amendment this week.

“It has always been the stance of MNLG that marriage is a sacrament, and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the state. We do not approve of any amendment or legislation that further seeks to define Marriage, because it is an infringement on two ideas,” wrote the group’s chair, Jake Barnett. “First, it reinforces the idea that the Government has the right to treat certain individuals differently than others, and second, it further removes Marriage from its original jurisdiction as a sacrament of faith.”

Barnett said that MNLG believes the state should not be involved with religious marriage.

“Under our policy, both heterosexual and homosexual couples could have their unions recognized by the state, but could not call their union a Marriage unless they sought the blessing of a Church. We do not believe any Church should be compelled to marry same-sex couples, but at the same time we respect the rights of Churches to do so if they choose.”

LGBT conservatives have also found the amendment problematic. The Minnesota Log Cabin Republicans are lobbying aggressively against the measure.

“In 2010, Log Cabin Republicans celebrated when the GOP took control of the Minnesota House and Senate. We looked forward to Republican legislators obeying a voter mandate to put a laser focus on the out-of-control spending at the State Capitol. It is deeply disappointing to see members of our party turn away from that mission in favor of a divisive social agenda,” Ken Smoron, Log Cabin’s vice president, said in a statement. “At a time when job creation, the economy, taxes, and the state’s budget are of utmost concern for Minnesota families and businesses, the proposed amendment is anti-liberty, anti-family, and a distraction that Minnesota just can’t afford.”

He added, “If we want to be more than a one-term majority we must focus on the issues that unite us as Republicans and Minnesotans. The days of using the lives of gay and lesbian Americans as a political wedge issue are over.”

The Libertarian Party of Minnesota held an “unusual” special meeting on May 7 to deliberate on the amendment. Party officials there unanimously condemned the marriage amendment.

“The proposed Gay Marriage Ban would expand government control and restrict the freedom of consenting adults to live their own lives as they choose. Libertarians believe that marriage is a private matter between individuals,” the party wrote. “We believe that marriage is a fundamental human right, and that all personal relationships, including marriage, should be at the sole discretion and agreement of the individuals involved, as well as any family, friends, or religious institutions they may choose to involve.”

It added, “We also oppose any attempt to place a marriage ban before voters, as the trappings of democracy do not legitimize infringements upon personal liberty; a 51 percent majority does not have the right to force its will upon the other 49 percent. We instead support a free society, where 1% can still be free to live their own lives as they choose, even if 99% might disapprove.”

The party also said it supports the repeal of the state’s Defense of Marriage Act, which bars same-sex couples from marrying.

The party’s vice chair, S.L. Mallek, appeared on the Late Debate, a conservative talk radio show in the northern Twin Cities suburbs.

“It’s about having parents that care about the child, not the gender of these parents,” Mallek said.

The Late Debate is hosted by Jack Tomczak, who has worked for Rep. Michele Bachmann and Tom Emmer, and Ben Kruse, a designer and media consultant who’s done work for a number of Republican campaigns.

Kruse agreed with Mallek. “I think if this passes, in 20 years, it will be repealed. I think Republicans will be on the wrong side of history on this one.”

Mallek added, “Government trying to legislate personal relationships… that’s not pro-liberty.”

In a separate episode of the Late Debate, Kruse and the Minnesota Family Council’s Tom Prichard engaged in a heated debate on the conservative principles regarding support or opposition to same-sex marriage.

“What it boils down to: Straight marriage isn’t very good,” Kruse said. “So why are we trying to exclude people who haven’t been given the opportunity to prove they can be very good parents.”

He said the gay marriage debate “distracts us from the parenting problem in this country.”

Listen to the debate between Kruse and Prichard:

Some Republicans have come out in support of same-sex marriage in recent months as well. Rep. John Kriesel, R-Cottage Grove, recently told the press that he opposes the amendment. “I look at it as: We are all equal,” he said.

Marriage equality seems to be an issue that is drawing GOP supporters elsewhere, too. Longtime GOP donors are starting to back efforts to make same-sex marriage legal in New York, with GOP contributors like Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Paul E. Singer, described by the New York Times as “one of the most generous Republican donors in the country,” kicking in funds.

“I think it is important in particular for Republicans to know this is a bipartisan issue,” Republican donor Daniel S. Loeb told Times. “If they’re Republican, they will not be abandoned by the party for supporting this. On the contrary, I think they will find that there is a whole new world of people who will support them on an ongoing basis if they support this cause.”

Gallup has the breakdown on its website, which includes the little-acknowledged fact that independents overwhelmingly want a third party and always have:

Interestingly, the poll also includes a potential barometer of ideological identification across the country. When asked to identify themselves by political party, 72 percent of self-styled independents called for a third party, compared to just 33 percent of Democrats. But when asked to identify themselves by general ideology, support for a third party among moderates dropped to 52 percent, while support among liberals rose to 51 percent.

Support for a third party held steady at 52 percent across self-identified Republicans and conservatives, suggesting that very few independents identified as conservative, while more than one in four independents identified as liberal.

If a quarter of independents consider themselves liberal and the rest are strictly moderate, it could move the 2012 presidential election in a number of directions. That bloc of liberal-but-not-Democrat voters could end up being a lock for President Obama, leaving it to the Republican candidate — already working with a smaller base than that held by the Democratic party — to fight for every last moderate’s vote. This would all but ensure an Obama victory unless more than two-thirds of non-party-affiliated moderates vote Republican.

Or the growing number of independent liberals disillusioned with the Obama administration over issues like the detention of Bradley Manning and the perpetuation of Bush-era anti-terrorism tactics could just stay home on election day, bolstering Republicans’ chances. Similarly, for the same reasons, staunch liberals may come out in support of a third-party candidate, to the detriment of the Democratic Party — though some have argued that the vote-siphoning effect of third parties is greatly exaggerated.

It’s simply too early to tell. But that large number of liberal and moderate independents fed up with the entire two-party system may very well end up deciding the election. Both parties would do well to start courting them, and soon.

O’Donnell was added after her victory and spoke for about 20 minutes.

“The stimulus spent a trillion dollars on a Keynesian fantasy,” she said. “Then they started talking about Obamacare and the bailouts, bailing out one industry after another,” the social conservative activist said.

“The conservative movement was told to curl up in a fetal position for eight years … well how things have changed,” she said. Her rhetoric was often against the “elite”: “The elite don’t get us — they call us wacky, they call us wingnuts, but we call us ‘we the people’!” She continued later, “the ruling elites may try to be our master … but we say, ‘You’re not the boss of me!’”

She had some one-liners that the crowd loved: “They [government] will buy your teenage daughter an abortion, but not a sugary soda in a school’s vending machine.” Or, she mentioned the “green police” in Alexandria, Va., putting “cameras in your recycling bins.”

She compared her movement to the “chosen people of Israel” and added, “it is almost like we’re in constitutional repentance.” She also opposed extending unemployment benefits, mocking the current Congress: “They say the best way to job is to endlessly extend unemployment benefits!”

The number of reporters in the press area approximately doubled before she spoke at about 3:20 p.m. After her speech, international and national anchors from FOX and ABC like Greta Van Susteren and Jake Tapper (and dozens of other reporters) waited for a chance to talk to her outside the ballroom, but she never appeared. The master of ceremonies asked for a prayer for Christine O’Donnell to protect her from “whatever you see” in the media, who will “attack” her. Or, as she said in her speech, “will they attack us … smear our records … is it worth it? Yes!”

The instant celebrity and conservatism of O’Donnell beg comparisons to the woman who robocalled for her, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. (Indeed, it was rumored that Palin might be the surprise guest of the afternoon — however, she was in Iowa.)

But does it translate to votes? The polls say no, with her trailing New Castle County Executive Chris Coons by 11 to 16 points. That didn’t matter to most of the speakers. Tea party organizer Amy Kremer said, “She’s not a good ol’ boy — she can beat Chris Coons.” Rick Santorum, when asked by a reporter whether she could win, said, “Of course she can. Have you seen the polls?”

But polls didn’t matter today. The results of the election are six weeks away. It was all celebrity and enthusiasm. In the words of O’Donnell, “We will be resisted and we must resist!”

This post originally appeared in The American Independent.

That said, it’s worth looking at the historical trends for this survey, to see if this is really as unusual as it seems. Here are more data from Gallup:

Forty-two percent is the highest percentage in a long time, but it’s not much higher than last year — when 40 percent of Americans self-identified as conservative — and only somewhat higher than 2006 and 2008, when 37 percent of Americans self-identified as conservative. And if you take this in addition to the recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey on ideology — where 38 percent of Americans self-identified as conservative — it’s not clear that there’s actually anything different about Gallup’s results. Americans always prefer to describe themselves as moderate or conservative, even when (as was the case in 1992 and 2008) they deliver the majority of their votes to liberal congressional majorities and presidential candidates.

Karl Rove (J.D. Pooley/ZUMA Press)

Washington memoirs are all about settling scores. Karl Rove’s “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight” takes that tradition to new and self-parodying heights. To read Rove’s recollections of George W. Bush’s White House is to believe that, for eight years, men of “courage and moral clarity” governed the United States and were beset by critics who refused to give them any credit. On page after page, Rove names the naysayers and picks apart their claims. He’s most at ease — his delight jumps right off of the page — when he’s able to recount times he shoved the criticisms back in their faces.

[GOP1]In the memoir’s final chapter, humbly titled “Rove: the Myth,” the architect of a two-term Republican presidency reports how angry he was when he read a passage in then-Sen. Barack Obama’s second book lumping him in with Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, and Ralph Reed as “conservative operatives” with “fiery rhetoric” like “No new taxes” or “We are a Christian nation.”

“I certainly don’t believe and have never said, ‘We are a Christian nation,’” writes Rove. “I put the offending page in my pocket and went about my business.” Later that day, he encountered Obama and fell victim to “feistiness,” challenging the senator for using “my name and the word ‘said’ and quote marks.” Obama, Rove reports, blanched when the torn-out page was shown to him and tried to wriggle out of the conversation: “It seemed to me he didn’t much care that he had attributed to me something I had never said and found offensive.”

Four years later, Rove offers up the encounter as proof that Obama’s image as “the truest, purest proponent of a fresh new style of politics” is a ruse, and snarls that “the last time I checked, I hadn’t bombed any government building (like, say, Obama’s great friend William Ayers); or asked that God ‘damn’ America (like, say, Obama’s former pastor and close friend Jeremiah Wright); or declared that I was proud of my country for the first time in my life only when I was in my forties (like, say, Obama’s wife, Michelle).”

It’s a revealing passage — it takes up three whole pages — that demonstrates just how Rove thinks. Accused of being a steamrolling, divisive political operative, he locates a loophole in the argument, and closes by insulting the wife of the person who criticized him. Apart from some gripping narrative sections about how the inner sanctum of the White House reacted to the September 11 attacks, “Courage and Consequence” reads less like the story of one of history’s most powerful presidential advisers and more like a quickie fightback book from some apparatchik ensnared in a petty scandal.

Rove’s quest to debunk and overpower his enemies in politics and the press begins with his account of the “broken family” that raised him. Nineteen pages in, he starts swinging at journalists — James Moore, Paul Alexander, Wayne Slater — who’ve looked into the suicide of his mother and the rumored homosexuality of his father for clues about his psychology. “The writers who are fascinated with whether my father was gay,” Rove snarls, “are really more interested in implying that all people who have gay relatives or friends must support same-sex marriage; otherwise they are bigots and hypocrites. And if one of these people happens to be Karl Rove, so much the better.”

In other, less personal sections of the book, Rove takes the same care in dissembling what his enemies have been saying. Throughout, he settles scores with political opponents while seeing past the fault in his own. Recapping one of the coups of his early career, he admits that he “destroyed the career” of former Texas Railroad Commissioner Lena Guerroro by leaking the proof that she had embellished her academic record. “Did I pass on to a reporter the information that pointed to our opponent’s lie?” Rove writes. “Absolutely, you bet, and I have no regrets about it whatsoever. Why should I? The information, after all, was true. That should have some bearing on this issue.”

Rove doesn’t have the same attitude about information that damaged his own client, George W. Bush. Rove devotes a chapter title — “Derailed by a DUI” — and five pages to how Democrats killed the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign’s momentum with a leak about Bush’s 1976 DUI arrest in Maine. Mournfully, Rove recounts the reaction of his campaign — “Bush called it ‘dirty politics’ and said, ‘I don’t know if my opponent’s campaign was involved, but I do know that the person who admitted doing it at the last minute was a Democratic and partisan in Maine.” Rove’s regret was that he didn’t outsmart the Democrats by leaking the information before they did: “Of the things I would redo in the 2000 election, making a timely announcement about Bush’s DUI would top the list.”

Rove’s pride and tunnel vision about his campaign tactics aren’t anything new in the Washington memoir genre. Much of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” featured the same sort of finger-pointing about her brief bid for the vice presidency. If anything, Rove takes more obvious relish in attacking the people who made his campaigns difficult — it’s mostly “the kooky left-wing blogosphere” that thinks he ran a dirty campaign against John McCain in 2000, or that only an “imbecile” could have believed the 2004 exit polls that showed a Kerry-Edwards win, and so on.

But unlike Palin — unlike most people with his portfolio — Rove was in the cockpit for much of a consequential presidency that launched two wars and dramatically expanded the size of the federal government. He writes about this the same way he writes about minor tiffs and campaign tricks. He spends a page trying to debunk the idea that Bush ever told Americans to “go shopping” after the September 11 attacks. Technically, he’s right. The closest Bush ever came to using those two precise words — the moment that most people remember as the “go shopping” moment — were his September 27, 2001 remarks at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport when he urged Americans to “get down to Disney World in Florida” and “take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” But Rove insists that the “closest he ever came” was a different speech in which Bush praised Americans for “going about their daily lives, working and shopping and playing, worshiping at churches and synagogues and mosques, going to movies and to baseball.” Even there, Rove skips past the argument made by critics — that Bush, in a unique position to demand more of Americans, gave an “all-clear” sign and moved on. In writing about Hurricane Katrina, one of his only regrets is “flying over the region in Air Force One on Wednesday, rather than landing.” In one of Rove’s few admissions, he admits that he’s “one of the people responsible for this mistake.”

“Courage and Consequence” is filled with such arguments. Pre-release excepts about Rove’s take on the Iraq War — that his biggest regret was that he should have worked harder to spin the fallout over the lack of WMD in Iraq — foreshadowed the way Rove would tackle most of the controversies of his tenure. At several points, he simply misstates facts. He impugns the character of former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who was removed from his position in New Mexico after not pursuing politicized prosecutions, by claiming that Iglesias was incompetent and gunning for electoral office. Paragraphs later, he claims that the only qualm that Democrats have with former U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin — who resigned after negative attention on his own politicized appointment — is that they feared it would help Griffin’s career. Left unmentioned is the real Democratic argument, that Griffin helped the Bush-Cheney campaign challenge the voter registrations of voters in largely African-American, Democratic-leaning areas. But to Rove, the most important Republican political strategist of his generation, Democratic worries about election integrity are basically one big joke. In an unsurprising chapter about the 2000 presidential election recount — revelations are limited to the angry looks and sighs that various players gave to Rove — he refers to the Bush team in Florida as “freedom fighters whose homeland had been occupied as they grappled with a blitzkrieg of lawsuits filed by Gore’s attorneys and street protests led by Jesse Jackson.”

Very little of this should surprise observers of Rove in power or out of power, as a quotable White House aide and then as a Fox News pundit who has reliably attacked the Democrats. Rove’s disinterest in policy or consequences of policy isn’t surprising, either. (“I didn’t pretend to be Carl von Clausewitz or Henry Kissinger, but I knew the Iraq War wasn’t going well,” Rove writes of his thinking in December 2006.) The historical value of the book itself is minimal. It functions, instead, as a test of whether Rove’s combination of pique and pride will be helpful as Bush administration veterans argue that they spent eight years changing America for the better, over the cries of critics, only to watch their work be ruined by Barack Obama and his pack of elitist liberals.

A still from Keep America Safe's "Al Qaeda Seven" ad (YouTube) and Cully Stimson (heritage.org)

One of the things Charles “Cully” Stimson remembers about the interview that cost him his job is just how run down he was when it happened. His January 11, 2007 sit-down with Federal News Radio, said Stimson, was one of 40 interviews he’d given that week. That’s one of the reasons the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs stumbled so badly when talking about a Freedom of Information Act request that would have revealed the names of attorneys who were defending prisoners detained at Gitmo.

[GOP1] “When corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001,” said Stimson to Fed News, “those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks.”

The comment, coming only days after Democrats took charge of both houses of Congress, blew up in Stimson’s face. Within three weeks, he had resigned. He apologized to the lawyers that he “allegedly was slamming.” He would never have done such a thing. Cut to last week, when he saw an ad by Keep America Safe, a national security think tank founded by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol, that demanded the names of attorneys who’d defended Gitmo detainees — what it called “the Al Qaeda Seven” — and gone on to work for the Department of Justice.

“I think the blowback against me,” Stimson told TWI, “especially the ad hominem attacks, was unfair. And I think that these ad hominem attacks — calling the Department of Justice, where I proudly served, the Department of Jihad — are disgusting.”

Over the weekend, Stimson joined 19 other conservative lawyers, many of them fellow veterans of George W. Bush’s administration, signed a letter condemning Keep America Safe for “a shameful series of attacks on attorneys in the Department of Justice.” The letter, written by Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution, compared what the lawyers did to what John Adams did in defending the soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre. One reason Stimson signed the letter, he told TWI, was that his “controversial” 2007 episode would bring more attention to a cause he supported.

One week after Keep America Safe launched the campaign, the strategy of Stimson and co-signers like Ken Starr and David Rivkin appeared to have paid off with plenty of articles about their criticism and a partial apology from CNN for the way it packaged its segment on the subject. But the pushback is unlikely to become what critics hoped it might — a humbling moment for Cheney, Kristol, and neoconservatives who aim to move the administration’s national security policy closer to that of the Bush administration. Sources close to Keep America Safe acknowledged that its “Al Qaeda Seven” ad had played poorly in Washington, but were confident that the “conservatives versus Cheney” story had played itself out without dealing a substantial blow to national security conservatives.

On Monday, the effort by conservative attorneys to criticize Keep America Safe had apparently peaked. In op-eds and in conversations with TWI, other Bush administration veterans largely defended Cheney, even if they agreed that the TV ad had gone too far. Curt Levey, a Bush DOJ veteran who now runs the Committee for Justice — one of several conservative legal groups that vets Obama nominees for court slots — told TWI that the criticism could have been headed off had Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) received, as he had requested, the names of the DOJ lawyers who’d done work for terrorism suspects. (The names, as Fox News would find, could be located with some digging on the internet.)

“Attorney General [Eric] Holder brought this controversy on himself by resisting Grassley’s reasonable request,” said Curt Levey. “Despite the usual rhetorical excesses of political ads, Keep America Safe has not argued that the Al Qaeda Seven’s past work disqualifies them from working at DOJ. So the Human Rights Watch letter is aimed, at least in part, at a straw man argument. I would add that it’s curious that many of the Democrats who defended Holder’s refusal to disclose are the very same folks who gleefully investigated every detail of the Bush Justice Department’s hiring practices in the hope of proving that the department deliberately tried to increase the paltry representation of conservatives among the ranks of DOJ’s career attorneys.”

A similar argument came from Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, in the column he now writes for The Washington Post. “Where was the moral outrage when fine lawyers like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Steve Bradbury and others came under vicious personal attack?” wrote Thiessen. “Their critics did not demand simple transparency; they demanded heads. They called these individuals ‘war criminals’ and sought to have them fired, disbarred, impeached and even jailed. Where were the defenders of the ‘al-Qaeda seven” when a Spanish judge tried to indict the ‘Bush six‘? Philippe Sands, author of the ‘Torture Team,’ crowed: ‘This is the end of these people’s professional reputations!’ I don’t recall anyone accusing him of ‘shameful’ personal attacks.”

Hans Von Spakovsky, a former counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Bush administration — and like Stimson, now a Heritage Foundation scholar — aligned himself with Cheney. “I don’t think it is unfair or somehow improper to criticize those lawyers who have volunteered to help the enemies of the United States who are dedicated to killing as many innocent Americans as possible and destroying our country,” Von Spakovsky told TWI. “I certainly don’t think those same lawyers should be in the Justice Department directing policy and making decisions on prosecutions of those same terrorists. That would be like hiring Mob lawyers in the Organized Crime and Narcotics Task Force or hiring someone who volunteered to defend the Klu Klux Klan in the Civil Rights Division. Those lawyers who all come from big firms have a wide choice of who to help on a pro bono basis and their choice of terrorists says a lot about them –- I would not hire them to represent my company, either, if I were still a corporate in-house counsel, because I would not want my company’s money subsidizing that kind of legal work.”

One week after Keep America Safe launched its campaign, there was more evidence of rallying behind Keep America Safe than of more conservatives turning on Cheney. Allies of the group laughed off the idea that Democrats could stoke more controversy by re-enacting the legislative drubbing that Republicans gave MoveOn.org for its 2007 ad asking whether Gen. David Petraeus would mislead in his testimony about Iraq and become “General Betray-Us.” Democrats, they argued, knew that they didn’t have a long-term winning argument to buttress the murmurs of conservative anger. In his conversation with TWI, Stimson poured cold water on any Democrats who hoped he’d become a steady critic of Keep America Safe.

“I like Bill Kristol,” he said. “I like Debra Burlingame. If I met Liz Cheney, I’m sure I’d like her, too.”

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) (ZUMApress.com)

The news that Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) had won the 2010 CPAC presidential straw poll was leaked early, to soften the blow. Before GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio had even begun to click through a Powerpoint presentation that shared the results, reporters were informed of Paul’s easy, 31 percent victory over nine Republicans tipped as serious 2012 contenders. Those reporters started to write stories on Paul’s surprise win, waiting for the official announcement — and an explosion of jeering and booing in the main ballroom of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. Sighing with relief, press aides for the annual conservative conference made sure that the on-site media had heard that reaction.

[GOP1] Just as relieved were mainstream GOP activists and traditional conservative thinkers who were pondering ways to make the party electable again. “I think Mitt Romney’s 22 percent was impressive,” said Rob Willington, a Massachusetts Republican strategist who’d designed GOTV technology for now-Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.). He was reflecting on the poll — not too significant, he said — in Murphy’s, a bar a few blocks from the hotel, late Saturday. Romney’s forces, he said, hadn’t lifted a finger; Paul’s had campaigned for the prize.

In another corner of the bar, conservative author David Frum, editor of Frum Forum (formerly New Majority), brushed off the result. “The Paul people all voted and the others didn’t,” said Frum. “I’m hoping it’s a matter of self-selection.”

The importance of minimizing Paul’s win united conservative activists like almost nothing else that came from the three-day conference. Even Brad Dayspring — who, as a spokesman for GOP whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), counts on Paul for “no” votes — fired off two tweets dismissing the result. But the 2,395 ballots cast were a CPAC record, up from the 1,757 cast in 2009, when Mitt Romney scored his third conservative win. And moments after the Paul results were booed, the crowd gave a roaring ovation to radio and Fox News host Glenn Beck, who rewarded it with a 56-minute lecture on “progressivism’s” war on American values with historical lessons — the evil of the Federal Reserve, the destructiveness of Woodrow Wilson, the folly of “spreading democracy” — that had featured prominently in Paul’s speech, too.

For as little attention as it got — for the first time in anyone’s memory, the news cycle-driving Drudge Report did not even run with the news until the next day — Paul’s victory in an unscientific straw poll revealed plenty about the state of conservatism. Narrowly, it revealed that Paul’s quixotic 2008 bid for president created a significant and growing movement of libertarian-minded teens and twentysomethings whose role in the conservative coalition will become more clear outside of CPAC. More broadly, it provided a look at the ideological hardening going on within the conservative movement as it girds for the 2010 elections. According to some polls, the Republican Party is on track to recover control of Congress and have a voice again in how America is governed. At CPAC, there was far less attention on how the party would govern America than on the need to disavow its past, popular embraces of “big government” — and on the need to embrace a hardcore libertarian philosophy that views environmentalism and the progressive movement as fatal threats to freedom.

Photo by David Weigel

Paul’s youthful crusade of hopeful libertarians — its size and its enthusiasm — was one of the real surprises of the conference. Paul-inspired or affiliated groups occupied five booths in the event’s exhibit hall; the Campaign for Liberty (the organization he launched after folding his 2008 presidential bid), Young Americans for Liberty (the student group launched at the same time), Students for Liberty, the Ladies of Liberty Alliance, and the Future of Freedom Foundation. Libertarian CPAC attendees packed room after room for lectures by the likes of Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano and likely 2012 presidential candidate Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico. They passed out a documentary about the Paul campaign, “For Liberty,” and copies of “Young American Revolution,” a magazine for college students with contributions ranging from an essay on economics by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) to a Wake Forest University student’s tipsheet on how she organized a blockbuster speech by Paul on her campus.

The Paul-inspired groups were responsible for one of the pivotal moments of the three-day conference. On Friday, Students for Liberty president Alexander McCobin used his speech in the rapid-fire “Two-Minute Activist” line-up to “commend CPAC for inviting GOProud,” a gay Republican group. That got a rise out of Ryan Sobra, an anti-gay activist who followed McCobin and condemned the conference for inviting the group. When he was booed, Sobra confusingly attacked Jeff Frazee — the head of Young Americans for Liberty. But he was onto something — it was the presence of Paul fans, who had crowded into the room for his upcoming speech, that meant Sobra would get more boos than cheers.

“I was thanking my lucky stars that the Ron Paul fans were there,” said Jimmy LaSalva, the executive director of GOProud, in a Saturday interview with TWI. “The Campaign for Liberty deserves a lot of credit for setting that tone.”

Paul’s influence surfaced in other ways that were less helpful for CPAC’s optics. The far-right John Birch Society, of which Paul has been a longtime supporter, made a showy return to the mainstream conservative fold with a co-sponsorship and booth at CPAC; because the organization helpfully offered free, spacious merchandise bags, plenty of CPAC attendees walked around sporting JBS logos. Oath Keepers, a year-old coalition of right-wing military veterans, helped distribute copies of the Paul documentary — a favor to Paul activist Michael Moresco, who had won the organization’s “citizen activist of the year” award for biking from the Statue of Liberty to Alcatraz Prison. “It’s the direction I think this country’s headed,” said Moresco — from freedom to imprisonment.

But far from being controversial, Paul’s critique of conservatism — that the GOP lost its way by growing government and must promise to slash and abolish as much as possible if it wins again — was a constant theme. It was present on Saturday when Ann Coulter, a CPAC star for whom the ballroom filled up an hour before her speech began, argued that conservatives needed to abolish the IRS and the CIA. When she ran out of jokes about John Edwards’s sexuality and Ted Kennedy’s drinking, she suggested that the GOP needed a no-to-everything philosophy similar to Paul’s. She paused and mugged when that inspired a chant of “End the Fed” — a Paul-divined slogan.

“I’m curious about this movement over there for eliminating the Fed,” said Coulter. “Yes, End the Fed.” She answered a Paul fan’s question by admitting that “if Ron Paul supports it and it’s not about foreign policy, I’m for it.”

On the surface, rhetoric like that contradicted a much-noticed CPAC theme — praise for George W. Bush. Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, told TWI that Bush boosterism was a friendly show of support for “our guy” after eight years of drubbing by liberals. And that was it.

“For seven years he didn’t speak at CPAC,” said Norquist. “The eighth year we didn’t want him and he showed up because CPAC was one of the only places he could speak to without being booed. Here was a man who deliberately divorced himself from the movement.” Medicare Part D, the Department of Homeland Security, and all the rest of it hadn’t been forgotten.

Outside of the conference, some critics accused activists of a kind of nihilism that wouldn’t be productive for Republicans. “CPAC has becoming increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years,” grumbled Mike Huckabee on his Fox News show, “one of the reasons I didn’t go this year.”

Huckabee would only allow that the Paul win reflected “the anger and the mood” that was fueling Tea Party protests and Democratic losses in some key elections. In a separate straw poll question on activists’ opinions of conservative leaders, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) was found to be the most popular figure in Republican politics– 71 percent said they liked him. In the Senate, DeMint has worked to block and filibuster as many Democratic initiatives as possible while proposing government-slashing, entitlement-cutting, brazen bills of the kind Paul’s long discussed. At CPAC, he said he’d rather have a Senate with “30 Marco Rubios” — the Florida candidate for Senate who keynoted the conference — than “60 Arlen Specters.” When TWI asked him how that made sense in the era of constant filibusters, DeMint said a crisis would lead the way to more pure policy.

“In the short term, we can’t expect to get any of our ideas through,” DeMint told TWI. “But at some point, we’re going to be forced to do something. It’s not going to be so much a matter of political philosophy if we can’t pay our debts and we’re facing default. At that point I think you’re going to see even liberals realize we don’t have any choice. We just need to be in a position where we have enough conservatives to come up with some functional policies to get us out of this.” DeMint shook his head. “I hope it won’t take a complete breakdown for us to come together.”

Paul wasn’t around to enjoy his triumph. On Saturday morning, he returned to his east Texas district to debate three opponents in his early March Republican primary. But before leaving on Friday night, he reflected on how and why his constant refrain for fiscal austerity and abolishing most 20th century government expansion had become Republican dogma.

“When I went back to Congress in 1996, Tom DeLay came out to a function in my district,” Paul told TWI. “He came out of it and he said, ‘You know what? Ron said that 20 years ago! Now it’s the same message and 20 more years.’” Paul turned and stopped to talk with a gushing middle-aged fan, then turned back to TWI.

“And with more credibility on the economics!”

It’s interesting that conservatives only notice “big government” when it’s something their political enemies want. When conservatives want it, apparently it doesn’t count.

• If a conservative wants a trillion-dollar foreign war, that doesn’t count.
• If a conservative wants a 700-billion-dollar bank bailout, that doesn’t count.
• If a conservative wants to spend billions fighting a needless and destructive War on Drugs, that doesn’t count.
• If a conservative wants to spend billions building border fences, that doesn’t count.
• If a conservative wants to “protect” the huge, unjust, and terribly inefficient Social Security and Medicare programs, that doesn’t count.
• If a conservative wants billions in farm subsidies, that doesn’t count.

It’s truly amazing how many things “don’t count.”

Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh can’t ever be satisfied with enough military spending and foreign wars.

Conservatives like Mitt Romney want to force everyone to buy health insurance.

Conservatives like George W. Bush — well, his list of supporting big-government programs is almost endless.

Ronald Reagan, often praised as an icon of conservatism, signed massive spending bills that made his the biggest-spending administration (as a percentage of GDP) since World War II.

Indeed, as GOP leaders are busy screaming about the recent levels of deficit spending, it’s worth checking out the historic rise of the national debt — and which party controlled the White House when the biggest jumps occurred.

Dick Cheney, with his daughter Liz, made a surprise appearance at CPAC on Thursday. (UPPA/ZUMApress.com)

Mitt Romney has not spoken at any Tea Parties. He has largely avoided the messy debates over the 10th Amendment, nullification, Paul Ryan’s budget proposals, and whether TV stars should be punished for using the “R” word. But at CPAC, at his mid-afternoon address to an overflowing crowd of conservative activists, it was like he’d been waving a Gadsen Flag and a tea kettle from the start.

“God bless every American who said ‘No!’” said Romney. “It is right and praiseworthy to say no to bad things. It is right to say no to cap-and-trade, no to card check, no to government health care, and no to higher taxes.”

[GOP1]The audience at this annual conference — one where he has regularly won the presidential straw poll, but one where he’d never been quite adopted as a true son of the movement — roared with approval. Romney had been introduced by Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), who never mentioned his party affiliation during his insurgent special election bid, but used it twice before the CPAC crowd. Romney, said Brown, was one of the “leading lights” of the GOP.

Brown had teed up the crowd for a jeremiad against “liberal neo-monarchists,” a “failing” president, and the threat of a “Godzilla-size government bureaucracy.” They cheered even louder when Romney pushed the envelope. He said the rebellion against Obama hinted that “history will judge President Bush far more kindly” than his successor for “pulling us from a deepening recession following the attack of 9/11″ and “[keeping] us safe.”

In one speech, the year-long journey of conservative activists had come full circle. The last time they gathered for CPAC, George W. Bush had handed the presidency to Barack Obama and Democrats had dramatically expanded their majorities in the House and Senate. Inside the hall, they accepted blame for Bush’s failures; outside the hall, the first Tea Party rallies saw conservative activists declaring independence from Bush’s TARP and Obama’s stimulus package.

On Thursday, the Tea Party and libertarian factions of the conservative base re-entered the fold and took center stage in packed-to-the-rafters educational panels. And at the same time, those mainstream conservative groups invited these activists to rejoin the Republican Party that had disappointed them. They’d learned their lessons. They’d closed the book on their failure. And in retrospect, didn’t Bush and Cheney seem pretty good?

“We owe you an apology,” said Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) in a low-key speech delivered to a room that was quickly emptying out after Romney’s speech. “But more importantly, we owe you what we have been doing since January 2009.” Since Obama’s victory, argued McCotter — and most everyone else at CPAC — the essential goodness of the GOP and the rightness of its policies had been brought into relief.

“Oh my God!” said David Bossie, the president of Citizens United, who was manning his organization’s booth and accepting constant congratulations for its victory in the “Hillary the Movie” campaign finance reform case. “Barack Obama is the employee of the year for the conservative movement! Every conservative should keep a picture of Barack Obama in his office and — you know how when people go to Notre Dame games, they kiss the sign? Every conservative should kiss that picture.”

Jerry Doyle, a syndicated conservative radio host, told TWI that the crowd’s outlook for the midterms reminded him of the attitude of fans walking into the Superbowl — “Everybody’s been waiting for the big game, and here it is.” He’d spent years talking to conservative callers who were fed up with Bush, but he wasn’t surprised at the speed with which conservatives and independents turned on Obama, or the speed with which angry activists took another look at what the GOP could offer.

“I think people had said, ‘You know what, my government’s going to be there for me, take care of me.’ And they found out, no, it’s not.” When Americans grew sick of their government, “Obama just happened to be the figurehead.”

That was the attitude that united conservatives who’d remained faithful all along and conservatives who were returning to a post-Bush movement. The biggest surprise of Thursday’s schedule was a walk-on appearance by former Vice President Dick Cheney, following a speech by his daughter Liz that re-litigated arguments Republicans had made against Obama for years — at one point, she accused him of “calling small-town Americans ‘bitter.’” The ovation for Liz’s father rolled on for more than a minute; he drew more applause predicting that Obama would be a “one-term president.” And when he headed down to the exhibit hall for a brief radio interview, some members of his entourage sported “Draft Cheney 2012″ stickers handed out by GOProud, a gay Republican group whose booth was doling out reels of Draft Cheney stickers.

“This grew out of conversations we were having back in November,” said GOProud’s Jimmy LaSilvia, pointing to the group’s chairman of the board Chris Barron. “He kept saying, ‘Cheney’s the guy! Cheney’s the guy!’” As he talked, more activists grabbed stickers, wearing them in proud view of hovering media cameras, and few CPAC attendees that TWI spoke to were completely cold on the idea. Some suggested that a terrorist attack might boost Cheney’s political stock. The cause was popular enough to draw in activists less than 100 percent comfortable with a gay Republican group.

“I got it from GOProud,” said Colt Ables, a student at the University of Texas-Arlington, shrugging a little with embarrassment. “But I like Cheney, so I’m wearing it.”

Conservatives who winced at the Bush-Cheney record were out in force, but serious disagreement with the back-to-Bush conservatives was hard to find. Two years ago, Ron Paul’s presidential campaign was lacking a booth in the CPAC exhibit hall until Mitt Romney dramatically quit the presidential race and opened up space for their back-to-1776 brochures. This year, Paul’s Campaign for Liberty occupied a larger section of the exhibit hall than any group except the NRA, with reams of fliers, copies of Young American Revolution magazine (with an illustration of Paul taking the presidential oath on the cover). An intern, Sam Swedberg, donned a sumo suit, a grey wig, a Wal-Mart-bought gingham blouse, and a nametag identifying him as “Big Sis Janet” — Janet Napolitano — challenging passersby to wrestle him. Jeff Frazee, who runs Young Americans for Liberty, told TWI that his libertarian peers were making out just fine with the neoconservatives whom Paul opposed strongly enough to endorse a trio of third party candidates in the 2008 presidential race instead of the McCain-Palin ticket.

The once-extreme obsessions of Paul’s fans bled into the rest of the convention. They were present in speeches from mainstream figures like Romney, and they were present in lectures that filled large rooms to overflowing. Tom Woods, the author of “The Politically Incorrect History of the United States” and a sometime ghostwriter for Paul, spoke to a packed room on the subject of nullifying federal laws.

“[Nullification] has only been used by evil people who hate America and hate black people and want to oppress people,” said Woods, sarcastically characterizing  the arguments of critics. “Oh, yeah. Because the federal government would never oppress people!”

Republican politicians couldn’t really avoid the arguments of Paul acolytes and Tea Partiers. “Senator DeMint, great speech!” said one fan who grabbed the South Carolina Republican on the way to a book signing. “But why didn’t you talk about the Fed?” But the enthusiasm was welcomed. Not even the John Birch Society’s presence in the exhibit hall (their display included a rare CPAC sight, a book attacking Bircher critic William F. Buckley) was very controversial. Republicans argued that the base was speaking for America, that Democrats were really “the party of no” because they didn’t listen to Tea Partiers.

“The Republican Party should not attempt to co-opt the Tea Parties,” said Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), in a speech framed around his potential ascension to the Speaker’s chair if his party wins the House. “I think that’s the dumbest thing in the world. What the Republican Party will do is listen to them, talk to them, and walk among them. The other party can’t say the same.” And he beseeched activists to help the GOP out with a new Contract With America-style statement — it wouldn’t “come from the mountain,” said Boehner, but from the party’s rejuvenated base.