By Michael W. Lynch
Date: Mon, Jan 25, 1999 12:54:57 AM
From: mlynch@reasondc.org
Subj: Presidential Hopefuls
"Where's the press registration?" I asked a young man who looked about the age at which one is eager to shave but doesn't quite have the raw material. "Go straight, take a left, take a right, go down the hall, and I think it's on the right."
I journeyed down the hall, past booths sponsored by Americans for Tax Reform, the Eagle Forum, and the Christian Action Network. I paused at the Traditional Values Coalition booth, which had materials comparing James C. Hormel, Clinton's choice for U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg, to the "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence," a particularly creative group of gay men in San Francisco. For a brief moment, I was homesick.
I shook it off, picked up my credential, and entered the main auditorium. I was at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference. Stephen Glass had made it famous outside the Beltway a couple of years ago, with a story of drug- and alcohol-induced sexual escapades that he invented for The New Republic. But it has long been an important event for conservative political activists, a forum for presidential hopefuls to deliver crowd-pleasing speeches. It was 26 years ago, speaker after speaker kept reminding me, that Ronald Reagan spoke of a "shining City on a Hill" at this very conference.
This year's crowd of about 1,800 was bimodal. One group was composed of middle-aged and older activists of the social, rather than economic, conservative bent. The rest were minicons: young conservatives bused in by Gary Bauer, the Leadership Institute, Dan Quayle, or the College Republicans. Everyone seemed upbeat--it was like noon at a carnival--which surprised me, since the impeachment process wasn't going this crowd's way.
"What have you got for me?" I asked a woman at the table of Americans for Hope, Growth, and Opportunity, a group that boasts Steve Forbes as its "Honorary Chairman." I started to pick at the goodies on the table, but she quickly handed me a bag, assuring me that someone had already assembled them for me. The heaviest item in my bag was a coffee mug emblazoned with AHGO's logo and "Steve Forbes" at least two font sizes larger. Forbes is no dummy--I searched the mug in vain for a "Made in China" sticker, a slip that Gary Bauer certainly would have taken advantage of.
I turned around and was confronted with a group of youths wearing "Bauer Power" T-shirts. What in God's name, I thought to myself, prompts a young person, so full of mischievous possibility, to give it all up and join the forces of fun-repression? There were probably close to 100 such ill-clad youths swarming the conference. It turns out that God has a lot to do with it.
Geoffrey White, a freshman communications major from Miami University, the source of much of Bauer's youth brigade, told me that he liked Bauer's message. We need, he said, to remoralize America.
I walked over to John Kasich's table. "What do you have for me?" I asked a young fellow sporting a "Kasich Pioneer" button. I held up my Forbes bag: Look at all this good stuff your competition is passing out--a mug, lapel pins, a book on the moral foundations of a free society, a book on Social Security reform, and a bumper sticker. He didn't have a damn thing to offer. It turns out this fellow is enrolled in a George Washington University nondegree program that provides people with a practical view of what politics is like. He was given the assignment to be a Kasich Pioneer just a day before and knew very little about the man. A true pro in the making.
My next stop was the Alan Keyes booth, where I spoke with Keith Proctor, a slightly disheveled, slow-talking man with a bag of Skittles hanging out of his suit pocket. Proctor gave me a Keyes cassette tape, a far second to my Forbes loot, but useful nonetheless. (I reuse propaganda cassettes as interview tapes.) The most important issue for Proctor is morality, neatly bundled up in the abortion issue. "He's a Christian man," Proctor told me, adding that Keyes would give Christians representation in Congress. (I believe he's actually running for president, but Lamar Alexander was about to speak, so I didn't get into it.)
I have long considered Lamar Alexan-der's presidential aspirations nearly as laughable as those of Dan Quayle. Lamar had published a piece in The Wall Street Journal that very day, assailing the presidential front-runners of both major parties for using "weasel words": Gore for his "practical idealism," the young George Bush for his "compassionate conservatism." Unlike them, Alexander bragged, he didn't need any adjectives. "I'm a Republican. I'm an idealist. I am a conservative--and proud of it," Alexander intoned, his ears flying away from his head at roughly 30 degrees, giving him a Dumboesque quality. "None of these words require any modification to serve either as a philosophy or as a political creed."
He endorsed a two-tier tax system--a contrast to the Forbes one-rate plan--and said he favored federal funding for education, particularly federal college scholarships and research grants. This man really inspires.
As Lamar spoke, I recalled a point Thomas Sowell made years ago about teachers' general aversion to academic competition. Noting that teachers tended to come from the bottom of their classes academically, Sowell hypothesized that they didn't have many happy memories of competition. Perhaps, I thought, the particular adjectives that have been applied to Lamar have scarred him.
John Kasich was up next. The well-caffeinated, freedom-loving, rock-music- listening House Budget Committee chairman claimed he just wants the government to set him free to do his own thing. He brought up regulations, saying he likes to call them "restrictions." He voiced support for an across-the-board tax cut and repeatedly professed his belief in God. "As the song says," he rambled at one point, "money can't buy you love."
Kasich was certainly the most libertarian speaker I saw. But he is affecting a worrisome populism: "Big is bad" was a major theme. "Whether it's big government, big labor, or big business," Kasich told the crowd, "they all put obstacles in our way." This, in my mind, misses the important point. What's wrong with big government is that there's no exit, no escape. The difference between the IRS bureaucracy, which is truly evil, and General Motors, which just produced really bad cars for a while, is that you don't have to buy the cars. At any rate, it would be nice if Kasich would focus on getting us a "big" tax cut.
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