CPAC, starts Wed. Feb. 21, will be a great one....
“Exclusive — ACU Leaders on CPAC Lineup, Donald Trump’s GOP, Conservative Movement Takeover: ‘We Feel Vindicated’”
FTA:The American Conservative Union (ACU) on Monday evening released its agenda for the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a lineup that amounts to perhaps the premiere conservative movement event’s strongest ever, as President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party and the movement enters its next phases.
ACU chairman Matt Schlapp, executive director Dan Schneider, and communications director Ian Walters sat down with Breitbart News exclusively on Monday night to discuss the event which features robust discussions of major issues facing the movement, the GOP, the country, and the world today.
“We feel vindicated,” Schlapp told Breitbart News. “After all of the internal family squabbling in the conservative movement and Republican Party and country generally [over the past several years], we feel vindicated that CPAC has been a moment where we in a very public way can talk about our disagreements and it has resulted over the last three CPACs in us having more political success and policy success as a movement than we have ever had. That means this is a critical four days and that we have set up the debate and the discussions once again where we can do this in a way that will make us stronger, not weaker.”
“The group putting this on is obviously the American Conservative Union,” Schlapp told Breitbart News. “There’s a reason, in that title, to learn from the Reagan example that when conservatives—even conservatives who have political differences—work together politically, we have political victory. When we decide to follow something to a fault line, we’re not successful. There’s lots of differences in that room, on the stage, but the theme out of this is going to be—last year’s theme was ‘A Time for Action’—so the theme out of this is: ‘What are we able to work on collectively to get done?’ So, there’s actually a united purpose and that is the Trump agenda.
“These are things that conservatives have been talking about doing our entire lives,” Walters said. “Finally, there is a guy who is not just talk. He is actually going about doing these things. The evidence is seen in a booming economy. He has unshackled it, he’s unleashed it—just like he said he would. Do you think a President Mitt Romney or a President John McCain would have been able to get these things done even if they said it on the campaign trail? These candidates all say one thing on the campaign trail, and then you put them in office and they lose their spine. We got a very different guy who’s very willing to keep his promises. We’re all benefiting from it. This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for for the last 25 years.”
I’ve always liked Schlapp and his wife. They make a perfect couple.