David Weigel on CPAC
Paul’s victory was not embraced by everyone in the room.
“Conservatives were united in trying to diminish this result,” Weigel says. “Conservatives don’t want their image to the American people to be septuagenarian politicians who bang on about the need to close down American bases and speak at meetings of the John Birch Society ... It was accidentally very revealing of how far right the party’s gotten.”
“They realized that if they were careful not to invite obviously nutty people ... then it would be a showcase for the Tea Party movement,” Weigel says. “And they pulled it off despite there being some really extreme stuff there. Sarah Palin was the Saturday night speaker... . The Friday night speaker was Joseph Farah, the editor of WorldNetDaily, who spent a quarter of his speech talking about President Obama’s citizenship and how he’s never really proven that he’s not really American. They pulled off this really amazing trick of showing off the strangest parts of the movements while getting cameras just to cover these normal-looking, middle Americans ... talking about freedom and the Constitution.”
Weigel says he doesn’t have a problem getting access to leaders of the Tea Party movement.
“I find the guys who really want to control the movement have a real problem with the fringes the guys who question Obama’s birth certificate, who think the government had something to do with 9/11,” he says.