Ahh, CPAC time. I remember it well. Moving into the hotel on Tuesday and not actually breathing outdoor air until the following Sunday. I ran the conference for three years and it nearly killed me.
Today, American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp will sound the bell, continuing a 49-year tradition that has quite literally changed our nation. When I was there, David Keene was in charge. There was an epic poker game on the Wednesday night before opening day. I wonder if the tradition continues. Alas, If I were to disclose the participants, I would have to kill you.
Matt has had some difficulty lately. And by virtue, so has the conference. I don’t know Matt well. I did host a dinner for him and his then-boss Ken Mehlman when George W. Bush brought them into his White House. I was sitting in Matt’s current seat at the time and I remember him being nothing short of charming and smart, as was Ken. Those were heady times, and everyone was totally pumped.
Matt’s situation is for the courts to deal with. I choose to believe him primarily because I know the people who serve on the board of the American Conservative Union Foundation and I trust their judgment, knowing things that I do not.
Regardless, Matt is not CPAC, just as CPAC was not me. Nor any of the other great executive directors who have served.
It is a little hard for me to write this. The American Conservative Union and I did not part on good terms, and why I step up now is a bit of a mystery. Stockholm syndrome, maybe? Nah. Loyalty.
When I was first hired to run ACU and CPAC, both entities had fallen on very hard times and it was literally my job to save both. I moved to D.C. straight away from a very comfortable life in Bedford, N.Y., and dove completely in. It killed my very nice marriage, actually. There were nights when it was just me and a six-pack in the basement of the old building in Alexandria, trying to organize boxes upon boxes of stuff that was pretty much a chronicle of the American conservative movement. It was not lost on 29-year-old me how fortunate I was and how great a responsibility I had inherited.
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Amongst the things I stumbled upon in that basement was a book that one of my predecessors had edited and ACU had published. It was a compilation of Ronald Reagan’s many CPAC speeches over the years. Reagan loved CPAC, and CPAC loved him right back. When he was elected president, it is said that he instructed his secretary to mark it on his calendar for the next four years and never let anything get in the way. He went on to attend every year of his presidency, save one for an emergency. He addressed what is now known as the Ronald Reagan banquet, now a gathering of thousands, but which back then was in the low hundreds. He spoke of attending CPAC as “Dancing with the one that brung ya”…and man, how he danced. I wish I could share that now out-of-print book of speeches with you. They were nothing short of phenomenal.
Phenomenal. That is what CPAC is, even to me now on this 49th-anniversary opening day as someone a little grumpy about it. It just can’t help itself, no matter who is at the helm in any given year.
Under my watch, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko addressed the Reagan banquet sounding an alarm about Russian intentions that, sadly, have proven entirely true. Benjamin Netanyahu scoured my hotel room for nose wipes and one of his very, very intimidating bodyguards nearly shot me in a moment of confusion. I met Mike Pence for the first time there, backstage, having a piss. I think his decision to skip the conference this year is a poor one, by the way. He should be there. Anyone seeking the American presidency should be there.
I could go on for hours with my CPAC stories and skeletons, and may someday, but for the moment, I wish the conference well. She has weathered much tougher storms than this.
Back to Schlapp for a second. I haven’t generally been a fan of his, but I have a pretty sensitive BS detector, and it is wailing now, on the eve of the conference. My day-to-day job now is crisis management, and boy are they managing a whopper of a crisis. It will play out, as such things do, and CPAC will play out, now going on 50 years. CPAC has never been about a person. It is about a great American movement and it has, in fact, shaped that movement quite brilliantly.
As it will, once again, this week.
CPAC is good. CPAC works. I’m pulling for everyone involved.
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