"National Security? What National Security?" ". . . David Keene and Grover Norquist, who have the biggest voices in planning CPAC, are on Obama's side against conservatives on many of these areas of [national-security-policy] disagreement. Specifically, the two of them (along with Bob Barr) smeared opposition to closing Guantanamo and to civilian trials for terrorists in the United States as 'scaremongering.' When CPAC is run by people sharing the views of the ACLU, CAIR, and Eric Holder, what do you expect?" –Mark Krikorian, February 23, 2010. Read his entire post about last year's CPAC.
The current struggle over the direction of CPAC or its successor defining-conservative-conference mirrors debate in today’s conservative movement. Today Politico’s Ben Smith and Byron Tau in their “A conservative civil war over CPAC“ reveal–
“Friction between parts of the social conservative and libertarian wings of the conservative movement has escalated into a shooting war in the run-up to the Conservative Political Action Conference. . . “
The Politico post makes indirect reference to the January 4, 2011 World Net Daily article "Now look who else is infiltrating CPAC: Conservative leader raises questions about host of popular, annual event." The article declares–
"With the Conservative Political Action Conference under fire for allowing participation by a homosexual activist group called GOProud and for a financial scandal in which some $400,000 was misappropriated under the watch of current leadership, Frank Gaffney, a leader of the conservative movement for the last 30 years, charges that CPAC has come under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is working to bring America under Saudi-style Shariah law. Gaffney, deputy assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, is founder and president of the Center for Security Policy and co-author of the new book 'Shariah: The Threat to America.' He told WND that Islamism has infiltrated the American Conservative Union, the host of CPAC, in the person of Washington attorney and political activist Suhail Khan and a group called Muslims for America."
Erick Erickson has, in our view, good insight into the uproar. Politico quotes the well-respected RedState editor–
"There are a lot of conservatives who see a larger problem with Grover Norquist and David Keene, and they've decided to fight it out and CPAC is a proxy for that," said Erick Erickson, the publisher of RedState.org, who said he won't be participating in the conference because he wants to stay out of the conflict. 'The underlying question is whether the conservative movement still has strong planks for social conservatism and national security conservatism. But it has also become very personal.'" (bold added - Forum's.)
Doug Stiegler, founder of the Association of Maryland Families in 2000 and their former chief, draws our attention this afternoon to the Family Research Council's (FRC) "Sticking up for the 'C' in CPAC." The FRC explains–
"For more than a decade, FRC was a cosponsor of the conference–leading well-received panels on life and marriage. But every year, we had to push a reluctant American Conservative Union (ACU), the founder of CPAC, to continue those panel discussions despite their popularity. In 2007, we finally opted out of the event after deciding that the annual tussle with CPAC officials was a waste of time and energy when we were busy fighting a liberal takeover of both chambers of Congress (who, ironically, were propelled to power by Republicans who had drifted from their conservative roots)."(bold added - Forum's.)
As a CPAC-accredited blogger in 2010, Blue Ridge Forum found one valuable panel about the Islamist menace here and one about the consequences of illegal immigration here. In 2009, we attended the Geert Wilders presentation in the same hotel during the CPAC conference which presentation — for reasons not at all clear to us or many others — CPAC would not itself sponsor. Again in 2010 at CPAC, both then-candidate Marco Rubio and ambassador John Bolton addressed the convention and spoke to some national-security concerns. As we commented last February however –
"But a visiting Martian anthropologist might conclude — if the extra-terrestial observer only read the long list of speakers and panels on the CPAC program — that few CPAC-attending conservatives believe the U.S. faces serious foreign adversaries with nuclear weapons, that CPAC-attending conservatives were largely satisfied with the state of their country's defenses, and that many of these conservatives did not believe we were engaged in a grave struggle at home as well as abroad with militant Islam."
The entire FRC's "Sticking up for the 'C' in CPAC" is worth reading. The article concludes–
"And we continue to believe in the founding principles behind CPAC–even if some of its organizers seem to have forgotten. In fact, this dilution of key social issues was one of the motivations behind our own Values Voter Summit, which we launched in 2006 so that these values–along with fiscal and foreign policy issues — would continue to be advanced coherently in the conservative movement.
That said, we are not 'boycotting' CPAC. We're simply not participating. FRC has chosen not to partner with a 'conservative' event that places the protection of marriage on the same plane as redefining it. Would CPAC team up with the Brady Campaign which fights to restrict–if not abolish–the Second Amendment? Would it collaborate with groups who promote doubling capital gains taxes?"(bold added - Forum's.)
Maryland and Virginia conservatives will have to make up their own minds whether CPAC or the Values Summit best represent their own sense of conservatism's proper direction. At least the issues behind this choice are now more explicit and out of the shadows.
If the Values Summit aspires to become the defining conservative meeting, however, it must take pains to broaden the agenda to include strong fiscal and national-security components. Politico's report that "[t]wo of the heavyweight groups of the broader right, the Heritage Foundation and the Media Research Center, have dropped out of CPAC and are expected, planners said, to add to the Value Voter Summit's heft" would appear to make this possible.
This bonding of free-market-smaller-government, values, and defense advocates continues, in our view, to be the key to future conservative success.
