That crazy right-wing conference? Yeah, I was there.

James writes:

While Dara chose to stay home with Bosco, our tenured cat, I headed down to Washington last week to report on the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. It was an interesting year to be at CPAC. Day one the headlines read: Giuliani is a go, but McCain won't do CPAC. From The Washington Times:

Sen. John McCain is the only major Republican presidential candidate who will not address the nation's premier gathering of conservatives this year.

Sponsors of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which begins today in Washington and brings together thousands of conservative leaders and grass-roots activists, say the Arizona Republican has "dissed" organizers by attempting to schedule a private reception for attendees after rejecting invitations to speak at the event.

"It was a classical McCain move, dissing us by going behind our backs," said William J. Lauderback, executive vice president of the American Conservative Union.

With the Brownback campaign slipping cards under CPAC doors and a person in a dolphin suit walking the convention floor (the message: Romney is a 'flip-flopper'), this year's CPAC was pure American tango. Will an outcast conservative base (not a word is spoken in favor of the Bush White House) be wooed by a buffed out, high maintenance, $100-million-rasing Republican candidate for '08? Will a conservative underdog get the last dance? One thing's for sure: conservatives represented at CPAC weren't nearly ready to settle on this year's prom queen, even if this queen is ready to settle for them. (Yes, this is an undoctored picture of Giuliani in drag. You've got to wonder, is America ready for New York humor?)

Also at CPAC, Ann Coulter proved that Stephen Colbert doesn't have a lock on playing the conservative fool (when will they stop inviting this one-woman John Birch Society to the party).

In the end, while Giuliani made a rousing speech on the convention floor, Mitt Romney won the 2007 CPAC 'straw poll' . More here.
One rumor spread through the Shoreham Hotel afterparties that Giuliani's personal and political skeletons may overcome his Presidential ambition. A forensic expert at the event told me he had $5,000 riding on the belief that Giuliani would pull out of the race once he raises more cash. Here is an article that, while not backing up this cynical claim, at least indicates Giuliani's troubles at home. (Gosh, and I remember Andrew Giuliani when he was just an annoying pubescient at his father's first mayoral inauguration.)

Jeffrey Hart: out-take

James writes:

Over at The New Criterion, I remark on some of the websites that have directed readers to this weblog and to my profile of Jeffrey Hart. Here I also provide links to more about what I've written about Hart over the past year. These notes formed the first draft of my article.

I am pleased to add Powerline to the list of weblogs that have taken note of Hart, and now the Alumni Magazine profile. Blogger Scott Johnson is a former student of Hart's, and his post is a dissenting opinion to Hart's recent direction.

Scott's post reminded me that an interesting paragraph about Hart's own time as an undergraduate didn't make it in the final piece. Here it is:

Over fifty years ago, Hart was enrolled in a course at Dartmouth that had a profound effect on his life. The professor was Eugen Rosenstock-Hussey, a Christian existentialist.

"He complicated my naturalism. I was interested both in animals in the naturalist sense, and naturalism as a philosophy. He said, you cannot live empirically. You live forward in time. You don't know how it is going to come out. You don't know how your career is going to turn out, or if it's the right career. Or marriage. Or whatever. Life is always a movement into the unknown. One of his repeated mantras was 'history must be told.' You are constantly creating new institutions, and your guide must be history. You see that here with co-ed, for example. Dartmouth a very different school than it was when I came here in 1947. Dartmouth is MUCH improved now. I probably would have stayed at Dartmouth today."

I still think about him and I'm going to write about him. I'm going to write a memoir called 'Snapshots From Heaven' and he's going to figure in one "Snapshot."

Letter: Ramesh Ponnuru

To the blogger:

re: 'How the Right Went Wrong'

In your profile of Jeffrey Hart you write, “Hart’s young colleagues at National Review have been equally unsympathetic: ‘In every generation,’ wrote Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru in the magazine, ‘some conservatives will lose the intramural debates, and it will be only natural for them to feel that they have lost them unfairly. They will maintain that they alone have stayed true to the faith. Liberals will, in turn, be delighted to tout these scolds as exemplars of a good conservatism.’”

Thanks for quoting us. But I should point out that the comment was not directed at Hart, whose name did not appear in our article. Hart, in his letter responding to your profile, says that we have listed him “among the conservatives who have lost the ‘intramural’ argument about what conservatism in fact is.” That’s not true. Still less have we “maintain[ed],” as Hart has it, that “Bush now defines conservatism, and that to deny this is to lose the ‘intramural’ argument.” The article said nothing that could fairly be so construed, and neither Goldberg nor I have said anything similar elsewhere.

Best,

Ramesh Ponnuru