Is CPAC a thing of the past?
I'm hearing a lot of conflicting reports.
After a couple years exiled to Florida, the annual CPAC gathering returned to the D.C. area this year. I was reading the reviews where some said the event looked boring and spent, with low attendance, and others contending those reports were part of a liberal conspiracy to disspirit the conservative movement. At that point I realized it’s been a decade since I went to CPAC for a day, media privileges and all. Have some fun reliving the time.
What I remember most was that there was no way I could have done everything in one day, but they still had pretty much the same setup a decade on.
Yet while the cast of characters changes, a lot of it seems the same.
CPAC had traditionally been for the “outsiders” of the Republican Party, those who wanted a party which was chock full of liberals in the early days of the Conservative Political Action Conference to move rightward. It’s the venue that gave Ronald Reagan his mid-70s coming-out party, allowing him the base of support for his 1976 run for the nomination and placing him squarely as the favorite after the moderate Republican Gerald Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter.
I think the event I went to was the beginning of a turning point for the conference. In 2013 conservatism was at a crossroads as several factions were vying for supremacy: first, you had the traditional Reagan conservatives who were now the insiders, but also determined to build on his legacy and perhaps his unfinished business thirty years later. Second was the TEA Party, which had gone from a novice group just a few years earlier to its own mix of starry-eyed Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-types and grifters simply out to trade and prosper from the latest trend. And finally you had the libertarian types who were in the process of going from backing the father (Ron) Paul to the son (Rand) Paul. It also had an appealing mix of old and new media. As an example of that, Rand Paul was the winner of the 2013 CPAC presidential poll, gathering a 25% plurality of 2,930 votes and edging Marco Rubio by 2 percent.
And while the TEA Party had attempted its share of CPAC-style events, none of them seemed to succeed for any length of time. In the 2013 perspective, CPAC was still the place to be to become noticed in the political world.
A decade later, CPAC seems to have become a celebration of all things Trump, which is something of a turnoff to mainline conservatives. As several have reported both in the media and anecdotally, attendance was down this year although Trump fatigue may not have been the sole reason. His dominance was why he had 62% of the poll vote, with a number described as “over 2,000” voting.
But now there are also more and more conservative gatherings competing for the CPAC dollar. For example, the Club for Growth is having a donor conference in Florida this month and over the summer radio host Erick Erickson is planning an event in Atlanta.
The question to me now seems to be whether CPAC will survive the era of Trump. An event associated with Ronald Reagan lived on that success for decades, but he also espoused a brand of conservatism that resonated with the people. I’ve said many times that populism does not equal conservatism, but that seems to be the substitute Trump fanatics wish for - it’s not the size and power of the federal government that’s important to them, they just want to be in charge of it, Constitution be damned. No wonder people complain about the “uniparty.”
You know, going to CPAC, even for a day, was once a bucket list item of mine that I checked off. But the farther I get from being politically active, the less appealing those things are. Besides the high prices and so-so economy, maybe I’m not the only one who feels that way.