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Monday, March 18, 2013
News / Opinion CPAC proves why voters think GOP is "scary"
Posted By John Grooms on Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 4:14 PM
If you wanted to understand why the Republican Party faces a rough road nearly everywhere but the South, look no further than last weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. It was grand entertainment for fans of politics and a showcase for the alternate-universe ambience and views of America's far-right fantasists.
Among conference speakers were NRA big gun Wayne Lapierre; Donald Trump, for God's sake, who was as bombastic, bizarre and utterly self-unaware as ever; Sen. Rand Paul, the conference attendees' straw poll pick for president over Sen. Marco "Cotton Mouth" Rubio; Jim DeMint; Ann Coulter; and newbie U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, winner of the Joe McCarthy Act-Alike contest. One of CPAC's, um, highlights was Sarah Palin's disjointed, wise-cracking speech that sounded as if she'd been hitting the bottle or the Oxy before coming onstage.
A poll released today by the Republican National Committee says many voters feel the GOP is "scary" and "out of touch." As if to prove those voters' point, CPAC stumbled in its effort to address the issues of race and gay rights. First, CPAC banned GOProud, a Republican gay group, from participating in the conference this year. The result? An event by the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage was nearly empty, while a panel on gay inclusion was standing-room-only. The next morning, Sen. Rob Portman, a conservative from Ohio, announced that since his son came out of the closet, he now supports gay marriage, causing some GOP bigwigs like John Boehner to huff and puff and utter the equivalent of, "Well I never!" The shit really hit the fan, though, when a CPAC panel on outreach to minority voters imploded into chaos when a North Carolina audience member Scott Terry, who got up to - get this - defend slavery.
With allies like these tea partiers, the GOP doesn't need enemies - which is exactly what they will have more of, naturally, if and when the party jettisons its racists and homophobes. That, dear reader, is as good a concrete example of being caught between a rock and a hard place as you'll find in American politics today.
By the way, this morning, as the RNC announced the results of their study of voter attitudes toward the "scary, out of touch" GOP, it also officially endorsed immigration reform and presented an outline of a plan to spend $10 million to reach Latino, black and gay voters. Good luck with that.
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