On Monday, Colorado Republican Party Chair Dick Wadhams announced he was ending his bid for reelection. He said he didn’t want to lead a party dominated by inflexible Tea Party “nuts” who know little about how politics works. If new survey results are any measure, this may be Wadhams’ best political move in a long time. Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling reports Wednesday that the GOP civil war against “rinos” will kill the elephant in the Centennial state.

Dick Wadhams

Wadhams believes that the state’s fired-up Tea Party amateurs don’t seem to realize that large numbers of Republicans in that state aren’t as conservative as they are and that in a state where independent voters make up nearly a third of the electorate, ultra-conservative candidates won’t win elections. Tea party candidate Ken Buck lost his U.S. Senate race and Tea Party candidate Dan Maes flailed badly in his doomed bid for governor.

The Public Policy polling data (pdf) suggests more of the same punishment is coming in 2012.

Asked to choose between a moderate Republican and Democratic President Barack Obama, vilified as a big-government liberal and a socialist by Tea Partiers almost since his inauguration, Obama wins by 6 points in Colorado. Against a conservative Tea Party candidate, however, Obama’s spread doubles to 12 points.

As Jensen puts it, the difference is particularly dramatic among independent voters, where Obama leads against a moderate Republican by 10 points but sails ahead of a Tea Party conservative by a whopping 24 points.

Jensen explains that those numbers demonstrate that “a lot of independents in the state are open to voting Republican next year but they’re not going to if there’s an ultra conservative nominee.”

Problem in Colorado is that Republican voters here don’t want moderate candidates. Jensen reports that 66 percent want to nominate a conservative candidate and only 25 percent want to nominate a moderate.

That 66 percent of Republicans working to nominate a strong conservative candidate will be alone in voting for that man or woman.

Independent voters here told Jensen they’d find a moderate candidate more appealing: 48 percent would like to see a moderate GOP candidate make the ballot compared to 33 percent who would like to see a conservative candidate make the ballot.


Jensen’s polling on the more general political views of Coloradans might come as an even greater shock to the Tea Party.

Voters [in Colorado] see Barack Obama as being more within the ideological mainstream than the Republican Party. 44 percent think that Obama’s “about right” on that front, while just 27 percent say the same for Republicans.

The percentage of voters who think the GOP is too conservative is higher at 47 percent than those who think Obama is too liberal, which is 43 percent. Another 18 percent of voters think that the Republican Party is too liberal while only 9 percent think Obama is too conservative, so that shows a considerably greater amount of ideological division within the GOP ranks than Democrats are having to deal with…

Finally, Jensen’s survey might give pause to Colorado Republican congressional freshmen Cory Gardner and Scott Tipton, who have generally joined Republicans Mike Coffman and Doug Lamborn and the new GOP House majority in pushing health care and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeals and warring against abortion coverage.

[Colorado] voters don’t like the new Republican majority in the US House, saying by a 44/41 margin that they have an unfavorable opinion of it. And by a 51/43 spread they have more faith in Obama than those Congressional Republicans to run the country.

Here’s how the numbers broke down in two specific related questions included in the survey:

Q4 Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the new Republican majority in the US House?

Favorable ……………………………………………….. 41%
Unfavorable ……………………………………………. 44%
Not sure …………………………………………………. 14%

Q5 Who do you trust more to run the country: President Obama or Congressional Republicans?

President Obama……………………………………..51%
Congressional Republicans ………………………. 43%
Notsure…………………………………………………. 6%

PPP reports surveying 517 Colorado voters last weekend. The survey’s margin of error is +/-4.3 percent.

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It’s worth looking at the historical trends for this survey. 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.

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The poll conducted March 26 to 28, surveyed 1,033 adults and found that 34 percent of tea partiers were between 30 and 49 years old. The national average age is 36. The only notable demographic anomaly among tea partiers was the relative paucity of African Americans, who make up 11 percent of the U.S. population but only 6 percent of tea party followers. White folks, on the other hand, are over represented, making up 79 percent of tea partiers but only 75 percent of the larger population.

More Americans have a negative view of the Tea Party than a positive view. Gallup reports that 51 percent of moderates viewed tea partiers negatively while 24 percent of moderates view them favorably. Tea partiers also appear to be viewed more negatively than positively by Independents: 41 percent of respondents unaligned with a political party view tea partiers unfavorably while 37 percent of independents view tea partiers favorably. Among progressives and Democrats, the number unsurprisingly dips precipitously: 11 percent of liberals and 14 percent of Democrats viewed the group in a positive light.

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

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 declining to file politicized lawsuits, 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.

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

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 — 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.

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. “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, said 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 I 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 said. “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.

“And with more credibility on the economics!” he said.

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“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.”

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.

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“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 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.

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

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National Tax Limitation Committee President Lew Uhler poses with Washington impersonator James Manship (David Weigel)

Ceremony attendees included Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice, Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots and Robert Bluey of the Heritage Foundation. In the press section sat R. Emmett Tyrrell, editor of the American Spectator, John Fund, political columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and Mark Tapscott, opinion editor of the Washington Examiner.

From Weigel’s account:

On the country road up to house, cars bearing “Bob McDonnell 2009″ and “Question Al Gore’s Authority” bumper stickers jostled for spaces along grimy snow banks… I asked Tyrrell what, if anything, was new or politically impactful about this statement.

“We’ve said this for 50 years, and we’re saying it again.” said Tyrrell. “We don’t have to update anything!”

Signatories of the statement — including former Attorney General Ed Meese, Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, the Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell and the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins – lined up on a stage alongside a blown-up version of the statement. Meese rhapsodised about how far the movement had come since the 1960 Sharon Statement crafted by some of the same people in the room today — it now included, he said, “people of various minority groups.”

Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America led the audience in a prayer, asking God to “equip us and guide us as we strive to advance constitutional principles.” …

Colin Hanna, the honey-voiced president of Let Freedom Ring, read through the Sharon statement and argued that it remained relevant, if one replaced key words. “Communism — or today we would substitute the word ‘terrorism’ — must be defeated, not simply contained.”

Heritage Foundation president Ed Fuelner was given the task of reading out the statement, word for word. As he did so, Manship — the George Washington impersonator — nodded at key phrases like “tyrants and despots everywhere.”

“We must print out the statement’s text on our journals, our magazines and our blog posts,” said Fuelner. “We must distribute the video of today’s ceremony. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a country to save!”

Before attendees signed the document under Manship/Washington’s watchful eye, they got a special live message from radio host and author Mark Levin, who appeared on a large projection screen over the stage.

“I want to thank the media,” said Levin. “I see them all against the wall there. We’re saving or creating a nation, here.”

Levin lectured the room briefly on the importance of fighting “pseudo-conservatives” and the greatness of Ed Meese, whom Levin said respected the Constitution, “unlike the current attorney general, who never mentions the Constitution.” To the “pseudo-conservatives” he issued a warning: “It’s our turn. We’ve had about enough of you. We’re going to take you on and it’s time to defeat you.”

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In an affidavit detailing the bungled sting operation, FBI Agent Steven Rayes argued that “there is probable cause to believe that Flanagan and Basel by false and fraudulent pretense attempted to enter, and did in fact enter, real property belonging to the United States” in order to bug phones, and that they were “aided and abetted” by O’Keefe and a 24-year-old activist named Stan Dai. One day later, the botched operation has become national news, an embarrassment that could tarnish the conservative media that turned O’Keefe’s ACORN stings into a national sensation. While O’Keefe, Basel, Flanagan, and Dai were released on $10,000 bonds, they face up to 10 years in prison if found guilty of “entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony.” The scandal marks a swift and staggering downfall for an activist who had been praised for months for doing the work the “mainstream media” wouldn’t do in exposing sloppy and illegal work by ACORN.

“If he’s done what it’s said he’s done,” said Seton Motley, director of communications at the conservative Media Research Center, “the left-wing media is going to be all over him in a way they weren’t when he did the ACORN investigation. They’re going to love pounding him on this.”

Motley didn’t excuse the charges against O’Keefe. “People can do good things and bad things,” said Motley. “James O’Keefe did a very good thing with the ACORN videos. If this is true, he did a very bad thing. I don’t think one cancels out the other.”

According to Robert Bluey, who investigated the “Rathergate” scandal for CNSNews in 2004 and who is now director of online strategy at the Heritage Foundation, with this stunt O’Keefe may have put himself in the company of fact-manufacturing journalists such as Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass.

“If you’re a journalist, you have to follow certain laws of ethics,” Bluey said. “If this is true, it clearly falls outside the bounds of journalistic ethics.”

Bluey was hopeful that O’Keefe’s scandal wouldn’t reflect poorly on other conservative journalists. “He made clear that he was not doing this from any ideological perspective.”

O’Keefe, a self-described “progressive radical” who studied the tactics of Saul Alinsky, made a name for himself at Rutgers University as the founder of a conservative newspaper and a producer of hidden camera stings of politically correct administrators. From 2006 through 2007 he worked for the Leadership Institute, training conservative students on how to start campus publications. In July and August 2009 he and 20-year-old activist Hannah Giles posed, respectively, as a pimp and prostitute seeking advice for cheating on their taxes from various ACORN employees across the country. Their investigation badly damaged ACORN and fueled a successful congressional effort to temporarily prevent the group from receiving any federal funds. O’Keefe and Giles quickly became conservative icons, sought-after speakers at Tea Party protests and events like The American Spectator’s annual dinner.

“Now James is a national conservative hero,” wrote Leadership Institute president Morton Blackwell in a October 15, 2009, blog post for CampusReform.org, “and I believe he will write his own ticket to a future career doing just what he loves to do.”

On Tuesday, conservatives scrambled to contain the damage from O’Keefe’s Louisiana debacle. Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website hosted the ACORN tapes and pioneered a new breed of aggressive conservative investigative journalism. Mike Flynn, the editor-in-chief of Big Goverment, told TWI that the site was not working with O’Keefe; Flynn told libertarian Reason magazine that “unlike the left, I don’t believe the ends justify the means.”

In a statement to TWI and other media outlets, Breitbart said much the same thing.

“We have no knowledge about or connection to any alleged acts and events involving James O’Keefe at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office,” Breitbart said. “We only just learned about the alleged incident this afternoon. We have no information other than what has been reported publicly by the press.”

The potential blowback from the Landrieu sting extended to some Republican members of Congress. In October, Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.) introduced a resolution honoring “the fact-finding reporting done by Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe III.” The resolution credited the two activists with “exemplary actions as government watchdogs and young journalists uncovering wasteful government spending” and asked for the House to officially honor them and “transmit an enrolled copy” of the resolution to them. Thirty-one other Republicans co-sponsored the resolution. On Tuesday night, Olson gave TWI a statement criticizing O’Keefe’s actions while maintaining that the ACORN sting had performed a valuable service.

“Individuals who lawfully expose wrongful activities by an entity like ACORN receiving federal tax dollars should be praised,” said Olson. However, if recent events conclude that any laws were broken in the incident in Senator Landrieu’s office – that is not something I condone. Citizens have an important role in helping to expose waste and/or fraud when their tax dollars are being spent, but it must be done in a lawful manner.”

ACORN deputy director Kevin Whelan pounced on the story as “further evidence of [O'Keefe's] disregard for the law in pursuit of his extremist agenda.” According to Whelan, it was more evidence that O’Keefe’s original videos “had been shot illegally and edited deceptively in order to undermine the work of an organization that has empowered working families for four decades.”

While attention is beginning to spread to O’Keefe’s lesser-known accomplices, it’s the apparent downfall of a conservative journalistic star that is leading TV and newspaper reports on the botched sting. On the way out of a Louisiana courthouse, O’Keefe’s first statement to the media was “veritas”–Latin for “truth,” and half of the name of his video company, Veritas Visuals.

“The truth,” said O’Keefe, “shall set me free.”

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Scott Brown casting his Special Election ballot Tuesday (ZUMA)

“What you’re seeing here in Massachusetts is a reflection of what’s happening all across the country,” said Meckler. Democrats, after all, had tried to turn the momentum against Brown by attacking his endorsements from Tea Party groups and painting him as a tool of out-of-state right-wingers. In a fundraising appeal, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had even called Brown a “far-right teabagger Republican.” Laura Clawson of Daily Kos derisively called him “the first teabagger senator.”

“Clearly, they’re paying attention to us,” said Martin. “They’re not ignoring us.”

Riding a wave of voter anger, and taking full advantage of an opponent who never fully engaged with the electorate in this Democratic state, Brown won the special election to fill the remaining term of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). The result, unthinkable just two weeks earlier, gave Republicans what Brown had campaigned on in the final stretch–the “41st vote” to sustain filibusters of Democratic bills. National Democrats greeted the news with a mixture of infighting–Martha Coakley, the state attorney general who lost to Brown, was blamed for running an “act of political malpractice”–and panic. In Washington, top Democrats worked phones to prevent members of Congress from being spooked out of re-election, while Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told reporters that the party had squandered its right to push through the health care legislation that occupied his party for most of 2009.

Republicans and conservatives, overjoyed at what many called the “perfect storm” that elected Brown, just danced, sang, and gloated. It was undeniable that Coakley had botched up her campaign. From winning the Democratic primary in December to holding a crucial rally with President Obama on Sunday, she had held only 19 public events. Brown had held 66. She made a series of baffling snafus and gaffes, from leaving the campaign trail right before the election for a Washington, D.C. fundraiser to telling the Boston Globe that she’d rather meet local machine leaders than “stand in the cold” and “shake hands” outside of Fenway Park. Even the campaign’s final press release, a pre-emptive warning of possible election tampering, was mistakenly backdated to January 18. When televisions at the Park Plaza Hotel cut over to her concession speech, Brown supporters alternated between loud boos and delighted victory songs.

“Thank you, Martha!” yelled a 30-year-old Brown volunteer from South Boston named Shaun Green. “Thank you for running the worst campaign ever!”

Todd Feinburg, a conservative radio host who’d tracked Brown’s rise, offered basically the same assessment. “It was the worst campaign anyone’s ever run in the history of mankind, probably.”

A few steps away from the stage where Brown would make his victory speech, a team of conservative activists–some from the state, some not–focused on how they’d brought together their movement to outsmart and outspend one of the country’s most effective Democratic machines. Two months ago, several of them had worked for the insurgent campaign of Doug Hoffman, a first-time candidate who ran on the Conservative Party ticket for a House seat in New York’s 23rd district, forced the Republican Party’s moderate candidate out of the race, and narrowly lost what had been safe GOP territory. Those activists looked at Brown as Hoffman 2.0, a candidate and a campaign that learned the right lessons from that experience and leveraged them into a winning effort.

“They were better funded than Hoffman,” said Eric Odom, the executive director of the American Liberty Alliance. “More importantly, NY-23 lacked any sort of a coherent get-out-the-vote effort. That dominated here. Phone banks, visibilities, giving everybody something to do.” Tea Party activists, said Odom, had flooded into the state. A few feet behind him stood Hannah Giles, the young conservative activist who’d posed as a prostitute for video stings of ACORN, and who had come to the state for (mostly unsuccessful) crowdsourced investigations of possible “voter fraud.”

Brown’s short campaign–he announced for the seat on September 12, 2009, the very day that many Tea Party activists participated in a “taxpayer march on Washington”–masterfully wove together traditional campaign strategy and outreach to old and new conservative media. The arc of his victory demonstrated just how the modern conservative movement can boost a campaign without generating a backlash from voters. His online campaign strategist, Rob Willington, explained to TWI that Brown focused early on outreach to conservative media and built on that with technology that let local and out-of-state activists grab a piece of the campaign.

“I concentrated on specific conservative opinion leaders here in Massachusetts for the first part of the campaign,” said Willington. “Right around Christmas, I started targeting some national political leaders, using certain hashtags, and using video.”

In late December, not far under the radar, the Brown campaign was sold to influential and far-flung activists as a winnable race–a chance to stop complaining and actually break the back of the Obama administration. In a December 30 blog post titled “Fight Everywhere: Scott Brown for Massachusetts,” GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini–who launched RebuildtheParty.com with Willington after the 2008 elections, and who provided some software support for Brown, made what was, at the time, a dreamy-sounding argument that Brown could win. “Any chance we have to take out the Obamacare abomination,” he wrote, “however remote, is a fight worth fighting.”

Organizers for both the Brown and Coakley campaigns now know that the race was fairly close by the time that this outreach occurred. In mid-December the National Republican Senatorial conducted, and kept secret, a poll that showed Brown down by only 13 points. As the candidate out-hustled Coakley, he was made available to conservative opinion-leaders. “He did a wonderful job of going from conservative talk show to conservative talk show, getting his name out there,” said former state treasurer Joe Malone, a Republican, in an interview with local TV station WECN.

There was universal agreement among Brown supporters that the game-changing moment came from a source that Democrats mistrust almost as much as talk radio–pollster Scott Rasmussen. His January 5 poll showing Brown within 9 points of Coakley was immediately derided by Democrats. It didn’t matter.

“In terms of everyone becoming aware of it,” said Todd Feinburg, “that was the moment it broke through.”

From that point, Brown became a cause for the Tea Party movement and the people who’d backed Doug Hoffman. Where Coakley had been able to avoid national scrutiny, conservative blogs and media turned her stumbles into major stories. After the candidates debated on January 11, conservative medias promoted two storylines–that Coakley had erred in declaring that there were “no terrorists” in Afghanistan, and that Brown had a “Reagan moment” when he referred to the open Senate job as “the People’s seat.” It was a line he’d used in interviews before, to little attention. On video, it got a prominent link from the Drudge Report.

The heat poured on after that. On January 13 Coakley flew to Washington to raise money at a long-scheduled event with the Massachusetts delegation. Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack, who had shaken up the momentum of the NY-23 special election after Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava’s husband called the cops on him, chased Coakley to ask an Afghanistan question and was pushed aside by an aide. McCormack tumbled; the photo of him sprawling on the ground as Coakley, hands in pockets, looked on, made it into the Boston Herald.

Every negative Coakley storyline was amplified and made infamous by the same means. On January 14, the Wall Street Journal–owned, like The Weekly Standard and Fox News, by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp–ran an op-ed on Coakley’s record as attorney general, putting the spotlight on a gruesome case of sexual abuse involving a curling iron. The story, aired out earlier by the Boston Globe but not yet known to activists, became infamous, as did Coakley’s verbal stumbles. At Brown rallies attended by TWI, there was universal awareness of Coakley’s gaffes and the curling iron case.

Liberals, by contrast, were too late to engage with the race. A reporter/blogger for ThinkProgress who asked Brown uncomfortable questions only arrived on the trail 24 hours before the election, too late for videos of Brown trying to explain, for example, a vote against financial assistance for Red Cross workers assisting in post-9/11 efforts, to have any impact. A video of the viral “curling iron” story backfiring on Brown as a supporter yelled a crude remark about Coakley also appeared too close to the election, after the momentum was sealed.

Brown’s online outreach also brought him a fundraising surge, starting with a January 11 “moneybomb” that raised $1.3 million, that put him far ahead of where either campaign expected him to be. He ended the race with $4 million in campaign funds, the result of $1 million in daily fund-raising. In the days to come, partisans will get a better sense of how much support got from more traditional sources–waves of ads from the Chamber of Commerce, late support from the NRSC and RNC, and early fund-raising aid from Mitt Romney, who introduced Brown at the victory party after remaining mostly absent from the campaign. And any effort to replicate the “perfect storm” in other states will need more candidates like Brown, who on Tuesday night had become a superstar, an object of outright veneration from supporters who couldn’t believe what he pulled off.

“He’s almost like a messiah,” said Deborah Strange, a former Ted Kennedy supporter–although she’d voted for George W. Bush and John McCain–who sat resting her bad knees as Brown gave his victory speech. “He’s given us hope. He’s given us hope.”

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