At the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington D.C. on Thursday, the red meat was served as the second course.
After a morning session in which criticism of Democrats in general and President Obama in particular largely took a back seat to positive talk about policy proposals and the upcoming mid-term elections, the tone changed.
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The exhibition hall opened in the late morning, giving attendees access to everything from staid policy shops and their white papers to an NRA-sponsored electronic shooting gallery and a Star Wars-themed morality play about taxes driving businesses away from states, complete with armored imperial storm troopers, rebel soldiers, and, for reasons that weren’t immediately clear, Boba Fett.
Around the corner from the Star Wars booth, a group of college-aged men and women, dressed in a hodgepodge of camouflage, bandanas, and sunglasses declared that they were soldiers in the “War on Youth” (presumably on the side of youth) and called out loudly for passersby to “enlist” with them.
Then, the organizers unleashed National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre on the crowd, and any sense that serious policy debate was taking place evaporated.
The 2014 election, LaPierre predicted, will be a “bare-knuckle street fight” in which the Democratic Party will try to lay the groundwork for the return of the Clintons to the White House, a name that elicited boos from the audience.
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Conservatives’ opposition, LaPierre said, are dismantling the “the core values” of the country.
“Our right to speak. Our right to gather. Our right to privacy. The freedom to work, and practice our religion, and raise and protect our families the way we see fit,” he said, are all in danger.
“Freedom has never needed our defense more than now. Almost everywhere you look, something has gone wrong.” The root cause, he said, is “Political dishonesty and media dishonesty” that have “joined forces to misinform and deceive the American public,” LaPierre said. “The political and media elites are lying to us.”
LaPierre was followed on stage by real estate mogul and reality television star Donald Trump, who appeared to be working without prepared remarks, and simply riffed on various subjects important to the conservative movement.
The country’s current leadership, he said, is “so weak and so pathetic” that China, Russia, and other countries are walking all over the United States on the international stage.
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“They have no respect for our leader and frankly they have no respect any longer for our great country,” Trump thundered. “It’s so simple to solve. What we need is a strong economy. What we need is jobs.”
Trump took a somewhat surprising stand on entitlement spending, though. Distancing himself from other Republicans, like Paul Ryan, who want to consider trimming benefits in order to stabilize the federal budget, Trump said, “I want to make this country so strong and so rich and so powerful, that we’ve have so much energy and so much money under our feet, that we don’t have to take away people’s Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.”
Many might see that as a daunting task, but not Trump.
“The bottom line is very simple,” he said. “Make America strong again. Make America great again. We have such unbelievable potential. We have to use it. We need the right leaders.”
Simple as that.
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