Beck spent a segment of his Fox News show decrying the march – and pointing out that among the more than 400 groups that have signed on are the Communist Party USA and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America.

“All of these groups, and the president of the United States, want nothing short of fundamental transformation of America,” Beck said on a recent show. “Do not allow them to get away with the lies! Do not allow them to say that we are just ‘one nation, working together.’ ‘We’re just trying to put America back to work, and putting America back together.’ These people, a lot of them, have fought their entire life to destroy America!”

NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, who’s playing a leading role in organizing the event, described the coalition somewhat differently, telling the Post that “What unites our coalition is a common goal to pull America back together and put America back to work. We are unified through a deep concern over a lack of civility in the political discourse. We are unified around our common vision of an America where we acknowledge our differences and work together to solve problems.”

It’s a nice, albeit somewhat vague message that has managed to bring together a diverse coalition of progressive groups from African American churches to LGBT groups, but whether it’s enough to motivate progressives across the country to show up at the polls in November remains an open question.

Denise Gray-Felder, communications director for One Nation Working Together, tells me that they “certainly hope that people will remain energized and engaged and carry that energy into the voting booth on Nov 2.” One Nation is registering as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, Gray-Felder notes, and as such it won’t be doing any direct political advocacy. She confirms, though, that getting out the vote will most definitely be a central mission of the group going forward.

“There is a major civic engagement and public education component,” she explains. “We’ll have get-out-the-vote information, and we’ll be giving out voter registration applications, so that is a big, big component of the next step of our strategy…. There is a civic engagement staff that’s part of the One Nation team, doing social media outreach, and there’s also a face-to-face component where, as of first thing Sunday, people will be out going door-to-door. People at the rally will be asked to make a commitment to make ten calls, recruit least two friends to volunteer, and volunteer at least ten hours getting out the vote.”

At a lunch session for the Texas delegation, State Director Peggy Venable criticized Mayer’s approach to the piece. She accused Mayer of misrepresenting the intention of the article when interviewing subjects:

She [Mayer] didn’t register with the media … And yet she was interviewing folks, and she told me she was doing a piece on tea parties. She called our board chairman and his giving covert. Now what is more covert than media coming in to a hit piece on our board chairman. She was not doing an article on Tea Parties, she was doing a hit piece on Charles and David Koch.

[...]

We get a very small, small, small single digit of our funding from our board.

She went on to say that Koch has never directed any of the activities for that state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, and that Mayer’s piece was “full of holes.”

In Mayer’s article, Venable is quoted as saying:

I was part of the Tea Party before it was cool!

And:

They’re [the Kochs] certainly our people. David’s the chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very appreciative of what they do.

Organizers for the event have also pushed back against President Obama’s remarks about the group during his Austin fundraising trip earlier this month. At the fundraiser, Obama said:

Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country.  And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are.  You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation.  You don’t know if it’s a big oil company, or a big bank.  You don’t know if it’s a insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it’s good for their bottom line, even if it’s not good for the American people.

Obama’s remarks have been brought up at three of the four events I have attended so far today. At a breakout session this morning covering leadership training for “November is Coming” — AFP’s organizational efforts during the midterm elections — the panel played an ad rebuking Obama’s comments on a projection screen. AFP President Tim Phillips also raised the president’s criticism during his opening session remarks, saying, “Were going to have some fun with that” at the Reagan dinner later tonight.

We reported last night that the picture is much more nuanced. And today, Roll Call’s John McArdle has a good analysis that also questions the blunt notion that voters are going after incumbents this year for the simple sake of their incumbency.

“Before pundits get too caught up in the power of the anti-incumbent sentiment, it’s fair to ask: How much of what happened Tuesday was a result of the old adage that all politics is local?” McArdle asks.

Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), for example, was a long-time Republican (with connections to George W. Bush) running for a Democratic seat.

Specter’s three decades of service may have been less important in the minds of Democratic primary voters than the fact that he spent 28 of those years as a Republican.

The anti-incumbency theme also dulls a bit considering that Specter was defeated, not by some political outsider, but by a sitting congressman.

In Arkansas, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D) has long been critical of efforts to ease the formation of labor unions — a sentiment seconded (originated?) by WalMart, an Arkansas institution. For that position alone, the unions spent millions of dollars in recent weeks to promote her challenger, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. “Lincoln’s incumbency,” McArdle notes, “would likely not have been a problem for those labor groups if she had embraced the Employee Free Choice Act.”

And in Kentucky, Secretary of State Trey Grayson was certainly the establishment candidate, having won the endorsement of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). But challenger Rand Paul had much more going for him than just Tea Party support: “Paul entered the race,” McArdle reminds, “with the support of a national fundraising network built by his father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), during his presidential campaign.” As Bristol Palin’s speaking fees have proven, name recognition can go a long way.

Finally, the anti-incumbency argument totally falls apart when considering the special election in Western Pennsylvania to fill the seat of the late Rep. Jack Murtha (D). Not only was the victor, Mark Critz, a Democrat, he was also a long-time Murtha aide. So much for kicking out the Washington insider.

That’s not to say that incumbents shouldn’t be concerned about the public’s discontent in the face of a jobs crisis, two wars, record deficit spending, a housing meltdown and a Capitol Hill climate where bipartisan cooperation is all but extinct. They should — as Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) and Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) can surely attest.

But Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Arkansas also reveal that neat and simple themes can also be carried too far.

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.

Oh, you betcha I’m going to be there. I’m going to speak there because there are people traveling from many miles away to hear what that tea party movement is all about and what that message is that should be received by our politicians in Washington. I’m honored to get to be there.

I won’t personally gain from being there. The speaker’s fee will go right back into the cause. I’ll be able to donate it to people and to events, those things that I believe in that will help perpetuate the message, the message being, Government, you have constitutional limits. You better start abiding by them.

Palin doesn’t have the out that Michele Bachmann and Martha Blackburn had–as a former office-holder, she has no lobbying/ethics hurdles to jump over. The unfolding drama and scandal of this convention, though, make her decision to attend it while bitterly blowing off CPAC seem less and less astute.

If Blackburn had attended, she would have shared a stage with Ana Puig, a Tea Party activist whose expertise is on how the Democrats are turning America into a “Banana Republic.”

From the schedule:

Speaker, ANA PUIG-“Correlations between the current Administration and Marxist Dictators of Latin America & MARSHA BLACKBURN, “Leadership” 9:00-10:00am

Here’s Puig making the argument at a 2009 Tea Party.

The SEIU’s Committee on Political Education spent $665,000 on a television ad supporting Democratic candidate Martha Coakley and $20,000 on Internet ads and a newsletter opposing Republican Scott Brown, according to independent expenditures reported to the FEC. The group’s political action fund spent $74,000 on robocalls on Tuesday.

Planned Parenthood’s Action Fund dropped $10,000 today on get-out-the-vote phone calls for Coakley and The League of Conservation Voters Inc. spent $350,000 on an ad supporting Coakley in the past week.

Brown has his own share of issue advocacy groups stepping in to aid his campaign during its final days. The National Rifle Association spent $19,800 on postcard mailers for Brown, while the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, connected to TeaPartyExpress.org, spent $146,000 to support Brown through media buys and online messaging in the past week.

Candidates are prohibited from coordinating with groups that choose to make independent expenditures on federal races.

“My company was contacted in November by a group in Louisiana that wanted us to produce a Palin and also Beck show in the Cajundome in Lafayette, La.,” said Bob Vernon of Big Chief Entertainment. “We had it on hold and the seating layout was for 12,000 people. $100 a head on the floor and $50 a head in the bleachers. We busted our butts to get it all done for them. When it came down to time for them to pay Palin’s $100,000 fee, they backed out and told us there wasn’t enough profit in the venture for them. I thought they were kidding … they would have pulled in around $500,000 NET for the one evening event.”

Vernon was still bitter about the experience. “The best part was these idiots that had the money to invest were filthy, repeat, FILTHY rich conservatives in South Louisiana who claimed at the start they didn’t care if they made any money or not they just wanted the citizens down there to hear the ‘conservative message.’”

Another event, a National Conservative Symposium that would have been held in San Antonio on Jan 22-24, has collapsed for more specific financial reasons. From their Website:

Due to circumstances beyond the control of Tea Party Support, we were forced to cancel the National Conservative Symposium. Our former event planner, Jennifer Ramirez-Jasiczek, diverted ticket sales to her Paypal account.  We have contacted Paypal and they will be refunding those of you that were affected by this. If your receipt shows payment to boutique@regalaffair.com or ANY other address with the regalaffair.com domain or A Regal Affair please contact Paypal and file a dispute.