This wasn’t Ronald Reagan’s CPAC
Craig Shirley
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CPAC recently concluded its annual meeting and, let’s face it, the event is showing signs of wear and tear. It’s time to take a cold, hard look at it now that the ground has cooled and most combatants are in neutral corners.
In the old days, even when Ronald Reagan was president, we would have vigorous yet also intellectual debates over all manner of things. Today, CPAC is mostly a pie-throwing contest. Yes, we know liberalism is not healthy for children and other living things but why? And why is American conservatism preferable? And why are conservative principles timeless?
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CPAC can trace its history to 1974 when, in the middle of Watergate, conservative leaders Tom Winter, publisher of Human Events, and Stan Evans, longtime right-of-center writer, told young conservative activists Jim Roberts and Frank Donatelli that conservatives needed to have their spirits lifted with a gathering. It was thus that the first CPAC came into existence. The featured speaker was none other than Gov. Ronald Reagan, who gave a barnburner of a speech before the gathering at the Mayflower Hotel, where he honored Vietnam POWs (including John McCain) and praised the Founding Fathers.
Reagan, in fact, spoke at every CPAC from 1974 to 1988, excepting 1976 and 1980 when the New Hampshire primary overlapped with the event. He came, as I recently told a reporter, not because he needed us but because we needed him.
The CPAC event was smaller in those early days, and the media always obsessed about the attendance and the annual straw poll. But the media have always been absorbed with the politics of politics and not with real substance.
As conservatism matured and deepened, the intellectual substance as derived from John Locke, which held the movement together, was the individual — the privacy and dignity and rights of the individual. Reagan often spoke about the individual over the state.
Unfortunately, CPAC has moved in a different direction, morphing into a comic-con for conservatives rather than an annual intellectual exercise.
The news kept getting worse and worse, and now to find out CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp has reportedly been paying himself $600,000 a year from CPAC/ACU and his wife, Mercedes, another $175,000, it all seems so sordid and unseemly.
Sex, politics, and money make for a good movie or Robert Ludlum novel but a bad elixir of reality. To add to his headaches, Schlapp is getting slammed on social media. And CPAC lost a lot of sponsors and attendees. The culmination of this year was every attendee I spoke to said the conference this year had little energy. No wonder.
Once upon a time, CPAC attracted the best and the brightest of the conservative movement save Bill Buckley, who always went skiing in the Alps at that time of year. For a time, it even attracted Hollywood glitterati, including actress Jane Russell, who stoically sat at the back of the hall each year, quietly listening to the speakers.
This year, many prime leaders of conservatism stayed away, afraid of being tarred. Kari Lake at the Reagan dinner? She is probably a nice lady, but I don’t recall Reagan dwelling on losing to Gerald Ford at the Kansas City GOP convention in 1976. Reagan simply moved ahead.
As if CPAC 2023 didn’t have enough problems, there were charges of corruption surrounding the annual straw poll. So who knows if Donald Trump got 62% or even more?
We can’t tell the Schlapps what to do, but their badly damaged reputations are hurting conservatism and the conservative movement. The ACU Board, of which I used to be a member, has some big decisions in the days ahead. And the question the Schlapps must ask themselves is, are they more important than the reputation of conservatism?
The conservative cause will endure, but at what price?
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Craig Paul Shirley is a conservative American political consultant and author of four books on Ronald Reagan.