Posted on 02/28/2015 7:04:26 PM PST by ziravan
So. I flew from Texas as a guest of Ted Cruz' PAC to attend CPAC. I'm in my hotel room in Crystal City getting ready to go back home in the morning.
This was my first time to attend CPAC.
My observations:
1. Three types of pepole in attendance: college intern type, political operative type, and far fewer: average people.
2. The Paul people were everywhere. Judging by the idiot sitting behind me at the "Big Government Sucks" rally, I'm not impressed. This college kid was trying to explain, very patiently, to his buddy that the problem isn't really big government, but how that big government is run. Oh! and the Constitution was designed to be flexible with the times.
3, Paul had a huge group there, all college kids. Cruz had a decent group present. Ben Carson had a decent crowd. I didn't see any Walker people there. Anybody else was negligible. The only time I saw el Jefe people was when they raided the ballroom before his speech.
I prefer Cruz over Walker. Indeed, I attended for the sole reason to vote for Cruz. I have to give Walker this prop: his showing was based soley on his current rise in awareness for the early campaign.
Let me also say that candidates could invite people to attend, and it seemed to be standard that invitees from candidate could get half price tix: 67.50/day instead of 125. I believe the campaigns paid the difference.
2, I was surprised just how many interns filed in for Bush during his speech. It was the only time we saw Jeb! stickers on interns the whole event. They literally crowded the ballroom to SRO.
3. Rick Perry came across angry and focused his whole speech on foreign policy. He didn't play to his strength as one of the most successful Govs in recent history. At all.
For all the talk of a walkout for Bush, the real walkout was on Santorum. Half the room left when he got up to speak. Of course, he was on right after Rand Paul spoke and all the Paul-ites were leaving as Sen. Santorum was coming to the podium.
4, I met Freeper C. Edmund Wrigt and he gave me a copy of his book, "How Karl Rove and the Establishment Lost...Again." I'm going to read it when I get home. Thanks.
5. I bought a T-shirt of the Cruz Tattoo Pic.
6. I finally learned how to manipulate the Metro to my advantage...now that I'm leaving.
7. CPAC 2016 is Wed Mar 2 - Sat Mar 6. The Texas Primary is now set for Tueday, Mar 1. That should make CPAC 2016 a shake-up event for the race.
8. I went to a breakout session w/ FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. Essentially, everybody thinks this will go to Court and there's a good chance that they Administration didn't cross it's Ts and dot its Is to survive a challenge.
I had a good time. I'm more jaded about politics and how it works. And less so.
Thank you, ziravan. Wish I could have attended. I would have voted for Cruz also.
The Pauls always bus in loads of supporters. That is how they always win the poll.
Palin did endorse Romney. Google it and you’ll find it
Breitbart also had a live feed.
Oops sorry. Should’ve finished reading the thread before posting to it
Thanks for the after action report.
I watched many of the speeches on C-Span.
Loved Cruz, Walker,Bolton and Levin. Very powerful speeches. Especially Levin’s speech—a real gold mine. “Usurpations” is a great word.
I enjoyed Phil Robertson too—it is so refreshing to hear straight talk instead of the mumbo jumbo from politicians.
Bolton eviscerated Hillary; he surprised me by being a much more engaging speaker in this format that I would have imagined.
Have a safe trip back home today. We appreciate you taking the time to give us a first hand scoop.
You'd almost think the GOPe did that on purpose...
Romney isn't running so why bother?
Thanks for the report.
ping for later
love it
Great report, to the point and logical.
Someone else and I both yelled, “FreeRepublic!” at the same time.
He heard. He paused and kept going. I don’t fault a candidate for staying on message.
I will say that he gave large chunks of the same speech to both the Big Govt Sucks rally and the Meet/Greet. There was a lot of overlap in those audiences (this was after his speech from the podium, which was different).
If I have a minor critique, it would be not to give the same stump speech to an overlapping audience. But then, he’d of had to give three distinct speeches in same day. I’ll cut some slack on that.
We're not mocking all older voters. I think what you say is generally true, but there are lots of older folks out there who are tidally locked into liberal groupthink.
I personally don't understand how anyone can survive past middle age and not wake up to what the Dem/left really is, but it's a fact. Some folks are just that unaware.
The facts of voting by age are well known, the elderly are the most anti-Obama voters and the young are the most pro-Obama.
We will never see the under 30 voting again that we saw for Nixon and others, the young today are a large liberal voting block.
I know that. We were merely discussing the fact that there are some older voters who are still voting Democrat.
It's especially disconcerting when two of those ignorant elders are your own parents.
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