It is a good gauge of the mainstream media\u2019s cluelessness that so many of its commentators were surprised when Fox News star Glenn Beck slammed the Republican Party in his Saturday CPAC keynote address \u2013 and the CPAC audience cheered.<\/p>\n
The annual conservative meeting\u2019s attendance numbered something like ten thousand, a record. \u00a0But as of this morning the counter on the conference\u2019s website showed over 436,000 views of live and replayed speeches. That does not include C-SPAN coverage (also replayable on line). \u00a0It is a fair bet that CPAC\u2019s audience for major speeches topped one million.<\/p>\n
The Left likes to caricature the Right as full of irrational rage. \u00a0Beck made this point, pausing in his speech to tease photographers whose flashes popped whenever he offered a stern face and gesture. \u00a0Perhaps the Left is simply projecting its own default emotion on its critics, but the truth is exactly the opposite. \u00a0From Beck to George Will to Ann Coulter to any of a number of others, CPAC put on full display that the American Right is rational and very, very funny.<\/p>\n
Of course, the absurdity of Obama Administration policies has proven a gift to conservative humorists. \u00a0It is easy to get a laugh about an administration that, as George Will remarked in his speech, finds unacceptable a world that has internal combustion engines and that does not have Chrysler.<\/p>\n
But as anyone with eyes could see for more than five years now, the Right\u2019s laughter \u2013 and disgust \u2013 is not directed at Leftists of the Democratic Party alone. The GOP is a target, too \u2013 and not just among the students and activists who attend the annual CPAC gatherings.<\/p>\n
For at least half a decade the swing vote in American politics has been driven by alarm at the growth of Federal spending. \u00a0More likely to cast ballots for Republicans, these voters abandoned the GOP in 2006 and 2008 out of revulsion at the run-ups in spending and deficits during the Bush years.<\/p>\n
They expected the Obama Administration to be liberal. \u00a0They didn\u2019t care. \u00a0They wanted to teach the GOP a lesson. \u00a0And they would probably have stuck with a Democratic president that was more or less like Clinton after the 2004 elections \u2013 still liberal but with restraint and (in combination with the GOP Congress of the time) delivering budget surpluses.<\/p>\n
In less than a year, the Obama White House\u2019s piling on of trillion dollar bank and auto bailouts, a trillion dollar health-care overhaul, a trillion dollar stimulus bill, and the nation\u2019s first trillion dollar deficit exhausted their good will. \u00a0In Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, this vote swung back hard to the GOP. \u00a0But that doesn\u2019t mean that they have forgotten how the party acted when it controlled Congress. \u00a0They may not like the don\u2019t-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste full throttle Leftism of the current administration. \u00a0But they do not fully trust the Republicans, either. \u00a0In deriding the Congressional GOP, Beck spoke for this pivotal group.<\/p>\n
A less flamboyant but equally telling CPAC presentation came from conservative writer Amity Shlaes. \u00a0Author of the celebrated history of the New Deal, The Forgotten Man<\/em>, Shlaes cautioned that slogans of opposition are not enough. \u00a0Conservatives need to develop their policies. \u00a0How would a conservative administration cut federal spending? How would it deal with the economic crisis? \u00a0How would it eliminate the government\u2019s unfunded liabilities? \u00a0How would it deal with inflation in the health sector?<\/p>\n This week the Congressional GOP leadership has an opportunity to start turning around the swing vote\u2019s view of it. \u00a0It is hard to see why the public relations department of the Obama White House favors domestic summits for getting themselves out of bad fixes. \u00a0The beer summit is still a joke. \u00a0The jobs summit underlined the fecklessness of the Administration\u2019s economic policies. Still, maybe this health care summit will work better for them. \u00a0But it has the potential to transform the public\u2019s view of the GOP\u2019s Congressional leadership, if that leadership stands firm and keeps Amity Shlaes advice in mind<\/p>\n For example, the White House plans to use last week\u2019s thirty-nine percent premium increase from Anthem Blue Cross in California to call for health insurance price controls. \u00a0The GOP should respond that the issue is not private v. public but California v. Idaho. \u00a0If Californians could buy the same health insurance that residents of Idaho can buy, they would pay a fraction of the price they do now — without price controls, without mandates, without new regulations.<\/p>\n Politics offers few transformative moments. \u00a0As I say, for the GOP the health summit may prove one. \u00a0If so, it will be only a start. \u00a0This weekend Glenn Beck, George Will, Amity Shlaes and numerous others offered good clues as to what the GOP needs to do. \u00a0The mainstream media may not have got it. \u00a0The Congressional GOP should not make the MSM\u2019s mistake.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is a good gauge of the mainstream media\u2019s cluelessness that so many of its commentators were surprised when Fox News star Glenn Beck slammed the Republican Party in his Saturday CPAC keynote address \u2013 and the CPAC audience cheered. The annual conservative meeting\u2019s attendance numbered something like ten thousand, a record. \u00a0But as of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":579,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577\/revisions\/579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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