Posted by Sean Sullivan on March 14, 2013 at 12:55 pm; Washington Post

The annual Conservative Political Action Conference kicked off Thursday morning as conservatives huddled at the high-profile confab with an eye on the future of the movement.

To mark the event, we take a video-heavy look back through the years at pivotal CPAC moments, in reverse chronological order. Special thanks to The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty and conservative consultant and Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley, for suggestions.

By Karen Tumulty, Washington Post

Published: March 13, 2013

From its founding four decades ago, the Conservative Political Action Conference, set to begin Thursday in Washington, has come to function as an annual gut check for the political right.

At the CPAC gathering in post-Watergate 1975, then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan famously exhorted the demoralized group to raise “a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people.”

By Craig Shirley

3/5/2013

John McCain’s presidential campaign manager from four years ago, Steve Schmidt, has compared the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to the “Star Wars bar scene.”

Reflecting on the dysfunctional 2008 freak show that passed for a campaign against Barack Obama, Mr. Schmidt would know.

The conference’s problem, for many longtime participants, is not the diversity and raucous freedom one might expect to find in a social club on an alien planet. The quandary is that what is now the largest gathering of conservative activists in the nation has wandered far from its original intent, which was a rejection of the status quo.

In the old days, the event represented the best intellectual revolutionary elements of the conservative movement. Panel after panel would argue and debate issues such as abortion, foreign aid, spending policies and about what the true Holy Grail of conservatism entailed – defending institutions or individuals?

The conference was always separate and apart from the GOP establishment, even in the Reagan years. Today it no longer represents a joyous insurgency but is instead part of the Washington political establishment.

Indeed, CPAC was as much about taking on the GOP statists as anything.

By: Newt Gingrich

2/20/2013 06:05 AM

I am writing this newsletter in a very direct, no baloney, effort to get across how much trouble we Republicans are in and how real the internal party fight is going to be.

I strongly support RNC Chairman Reince Priebus’ effort to think through the lessons of 2012 and develop a better path for the Republican Party.

However there are going to be some very powerful opponents to any serious rethinking of Republican doctrines and strategies.

February 14, 2013

By Craig Shirley

A 50 year-old fight on the right between the Republicans and the conservatives has broken out again over who is right, what is right and how it all fits together or falls apart. Don’t think for a moment that this isn’t for real and isn’t historic because it is, just as it was between Goldwater and Rockefeller, Reagan and Ford and Reagan and Bush.

These fights were not only ideological, they were cultural as well. Just as they are now. Indeed, Ronald Reagan made it his business in 1977 to take on the “country club, corporate board room” image of the GOP. In that speech, he said the GOP should be the party of the individual and not the group.

This is the essential, serious difference between Republicans and conservatives.

By: Craig Shirley  
2/6/2013 10:06 AM

Forthcoming movies starring Michael Douglas as Ronald Reagan and another with Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan have sent chills up the spines of Reagan historians as they well might face another long slog of pushing back against mythology and disinformation created to alter or undermine the Gipper’s legacy.

Ideology aside, at 75, Jane Fonda is nearly 20 years older than Nancy Reagan when she and the new 40th president entered the White House in 1981. Douglas is just one year younger at 68 than Reagan was in 1980, but looks more careworn now than the zestful Gipper did then. Reagan’s followers have higher hopes for the biopic now being undertaken by Hollywood veteran Mark Joseph based on books by Paul Kengor.

Several years ago a group of us were invited to a luncheon featuring Rick Pearlstein, who there discussed the forthcoming release of a paperback version of his book, “Before the Storm.” The book is a detailed account of the early days of the conservative movement, the Goldwater campaign, but also a subtle implication of how the rise of conservatism undermined consensus in America.

By MAUREEN MACKEY, The Fiscal Times February 3, 2013

As far back as the mid-1990s, Republican Senator John McCain – Vietnam War hero – established himself as a top GOP spokesman on issues of national security. He staked his claim as a soldier who had been captured by the North Vietnamese in 1967, was brutally tortured, and almost died. His broken arms and leg were never properly treated, but he was nevertheless placed in a tiger cage in solitary confinement for two years.

That might explain why this former POW supported the surge of troops in Iraq and why he lit into his one-time friend, Chuck Hagel, at last Thursday’s contentious Senate hearings. Hagel, President Obama’s choice for Defense Secretary to replace Leon Panetta, publicly opposed the surge and called it “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.”

Craig Shirley, The Weekly Standard

February 11, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 21

There are now some 1,000 books about Ronald Wilson Reagan and, according to Amazon, 86 documentaries. The bad ones are sloppy; the worst sloppily push a political narrative.

The latest documentary has a few good moments, but it breaks no new ground. The Reagan Presidency doesn’t cover the old ground accurately, either. But the greatest failing of the film, tentatively scheduled to air on PBS in mid-February, is its lack of texture. It doesn’t convey the great arguments of the era, many of them brought to the surface by Reagan. The Clintons derided the 1980s as the “Decade of Greed,” but as things turned out, that was an appellation more properly applied to their own decade. The 1980s were a time of decisive debates about freedom and tyranny, good and evil. The Reagan Presidency touches upon none of this.

By CRAIG SHIRLEY, The Fiscal Times January 18, 2013

In bars and on luxury cruise ships, in hotel rooms and in the halls of Congress, on TV shows and across the Internet, the catchphrase on Republican lips is, “What do we do about the party?”

So desperate are the House Republicans for inspiration and cohesion at this pivotal moment in time that as a featured speaker at the GOP retreat this week in Williamsburg, Virginia, they invited the first blind man who ever climbed Mt. Everest to address them.

By CRAIG SHIRLEY, The Fiscal Times December 31, 2012

As President Obama and congressional leaders continue to joust in a last-ditch effort to avert the fiscal cliff, it’s time to articulate a brutal truth: There has never been a more incompetent group of negotiators than the modern Republicans.

Recent polls, including one just released by Reuters, bear this out. More Americans blame Republicans in Congress for the current fiscal cliff crisis than they blame congressional Democrats or President Obama.

The GOP has been so bad at negotiating during the endless cliff talks that they’re now in danger of losing tax cuts as their signature issue. They’ve also somehow abdicated their historic support for growth.