The Conservatives' 'Cleansing' Moment

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell got a standing ovation when he criticized President Obama's plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. (By Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)
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A measure of the conservative predicament was the seeming reluctance of some speakers to directly attack the president. It is as though Obama's popularity created a cloak of unmentionability. "Nancy Pelosi" and "Harry Reid," however, served as pungent invectives for this crowd. Talk show host Roger Hedgecock got a bit personal in his ballroom speech Thursday: "I've never met Pelosi's husband, but I want to give the guy a medal. Can you imagine?"

Pelosi and Reid are really the ones calling the shots, not Obama, said anti-taxation guru Grover Norquist at a gathering of young conservatives Friday morning.

"Barack Obama is the guy who signs the bills, but Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are the ones who run the government," he said. If the government were a martini, he said, "Obama is the vermouth."

One man did take on Obama repeatedly. Romney, in a carefully crafted address late Friday that sounded like a practice run for a 2012 presidential stump speech, began with conciliatory words for the new president before his rhetoric sharpened, culminating in standing ovations and one brief eruption of "USA! USA! USA!"

"It is not the time to fulfill every liberal dream and spend the country into catastrophe," said Romney, who edged Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal in a straw poll yesterday as the person CPAC attendees would like to see as the GOP presidential candidate in 2012.

Noting Obama's announcement Friday that combat troops will be out of Iraq by August 2010, Romney said, "It is in spite of Barack Obama's stance on Iraq, not because of it, that the troops are coming home in victory." The ballroom erupted in applause.

Rush Limbaugh, touted by many conservatives as the de facto head of the party in the interregnum, closed the conference with his own speech. "We can take this country back," the radio host told the assembly. "All we need is to nominate the right candidate. It's no more complicated than that."

"We're not quitting. We're not giving up," he said to some of the loudest applause of the weekend.