On Friday, the Republican presidential race shrank to the size of a hotel ballroom. Three top contenders made pitches to conservative activists gathered in Washington — each man hoping that a speech could unite a movement that months of campaigning had not.
It couldn’t. But each candidate received loud ovations as he battled for the energized core of the Republican electorate.
Speaking at CPAC on Friday, Republican Presidential candidates Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich weighed in on President Obama's plan that would have required religiously affiliated employers to provide contraception coverage to women. (Feb. 10)
Former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) stressed his ideological purity. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) stressed his courage, casting himself as an angry outsider, beset by both Democrats and his own party’s establishment.
And former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney — the hobbled front-runner, still struggling to stop conservatives from turning to the other two — talked about his experience.
In what could be one of his most important speeches, due to the critical role played by party conservatives, Romney said he’d been living the ideals of the right for decades as a businessman and “severely conservative” governor in a liberal state.
“I know conservatism,” Romney said, repeating the word or its variants 24 times in his speech. “Because I have lived conservatism.”
Romney seemed to win over some of the activists. Yet there were lingering doubts.
“A little bit like the guy on the playground who gives himself a nickname” because no one else will do it, said Eric Kohn, 30, a public relations professional from Chicago who wore a lapel pin that said “Capitalism.” “He knows he’s never going to be monikered as a conservative by the rest of the movement.”
The three candidates spoke, hours apart, at a conference that drew a large and lively swath of the American right to the Marriott Wardman Park. The Conservative Political Action Conference is a famous stage for political theater: On Friday alone, there was a ventriloquist act, a group of protesters with their mouths taped shut (for the silence of poverty) and a man dressed as Britain’s King George III. “Digital liberty panel?” a young woman asked passing conference-goers outside a near-empty room. “No? There’s an open bar.”
But in the Marriott ballroom, Friday’s business was serious.
Santorum went first. Speaking with his wife and several of his children standing behind him, he argued that the way to beat President Obama in November was to nominate someone who was Obama’s ideological opposite.
In other words: him.
“I think we have learned our lesson. And the lesson is that we will no longer abandon and apologize for the principles, and principles that made this country great — for a hollow victory in November,” Santorum said.
He laid out hard-right positions on the idea of human-caused climate change (a “facade”) and President Obama’s health-care plan. Without naming Romney, Santorum said his competitor had been less conservative on both subjects in the past.
Foster Friess, a major donor to a super PAC supporting Santorum, was less coy. As he introduced Santorum, he told a joke about Romney’s past shifts in political belief.
“A conservative, a liberal and a moderate walked into a bar,” Friees said. “The bartender says, ‘Hi, Mitt!’ ”
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