It was an eventful morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference — and a surprising one. Newt Gingrich dazzled with an attack on Hillary Clinton, immigrant-bashing talk show host Laura Ingraham continued her screed against Jeb Bush by swiping at his wife (!) and unintentionally made trouble for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, and both Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and former Texas governor Rick Perry did themselves a world of good.
Newt Gingrich had a simple and clever argument: Arab states try to undermine the United States by giving gobs of money to universities and think tanks, and now they are trying to do the same by buying Hillary Clinton. Gingrich attacked President Obama, saying he has “no idea what planet he is on” and emphasized, “ISIS [the Islamic State] is a piece of a worldwide global threat. But it is not the threat.” The threat is radical jihadism, which Gingrich says is not simply barbaric attacks on nonbelievers. He said we must also be concerned about the “financial penetration” of the United States. In accepting money for her foundation from countries that “support terrorism,” he said Clinton has created not just an ethical issue but also a national security risk. He said: “It’s clear to me. The Clinton Foundation is going to have to report every foreign contribution. Period.” Analogizing to Nazis and Communists who tried to infiltrate the United States, he said he shuddered to think what Clinton was discussing behind closed doors while asking for money from dictatorships. Gingrich is famous for hyperbole, but it’s a real issue and he is expertly able to raise it.
Next up was Ingraham, who continued her bizarre attack on Jeb Bush with a nasty jab at his wife. (“What woman doesn’t like a man who gives her a blank check at Tiffany’s?”) She continued her anti-immigrant rant, again seeming incredulous that anyone could say immigrants are more entrepreneurial than native-born Americans. The facts are on Bush’s side, but the ultimate comeuppance came when Rubio followed her with a moving ode to immigrants like his family. However, in an effort that one supposes is aimed at pumping up Bush rivals, she attempted to defend Walker’s remark about his experience with union protesters as a joke. It wasn’t. A Walker spokesman told me unequivocally he did not mean it as a joke and hadn’t asked Ingraham to say it was. He e-mailed, “No and he has been very clear from the moment he stepped off stage.” He forwarded a statement last night from a Walker spokeswoman: “Governor Walker believes our fight against ISIS is one of the most important issues our country faces. He was in no way comparing any American citizen to ISIS. What the governor was saying was when faced with adversity he chooses strength and leadership. Those are the qualities we need to fix the leadership void this White House has created.” As we have noted, it was not an artful answer yesterday, but Ingraham and others do Walker no favors by coming up with fake excuses.
Then there was Rubio, who demonstrated that he is the most talented and moving speaker in the GOP. Greeted with a warm standing ovation, he said he knew that United States is a unique country because “When was the last time a boatload of refugees from America washed up on the shores of another country?” (Take that, anti-immigration cranks!) He spoke at length on foreign policy, criticizing the president, who “treats the ayatollah in Iran with more respect than the prime minister of Israel.” He derided the president for thinking he can defeat jihadists by “giving them a job” and said he should stop badmouthing the United States around the world. “That’s the U.N.’s job,” he cracked. He was most inspirational when talking about his family’s experience. “I have a debt to America I will never be able to repay,” he said in recounting his parents’ flight from Cuba. The United States, for Rubio, is not just a country. “It is the place that literally changed the history of my family,” he said. In the Q and A, he cranked it up yet another level. He rattled off a list of measures we could take to defeat the Islamic State and decried executive action by explaining that if the president unilaterally cut taxes by refusing to collect taxes above a certain rate he would oppose it. He explained he had learned from the immigration fight that unless we have border security, there will be no faith to do the rest of reform, an answer that received mild applause but certainly did not step away from his support for reform. To the contrary, he made the case that we need to switch to a more merit-based legal immigration system. In an amusing word association game, he thought up “yesterday” in relation to Hillary Clinton and “failed” with regard to Obama. Rubio made a strong showing and may have planted the seed that he is the unifying, forward-looking leader if Bush cannot draw in the base and if Walker cannot sustain his place as frontrunner.
Then came Perry. Like Rubio, he focused at length on foreign policy. He announced that the administration’s failures in Iraq and Syria “allowed the emergence of ISIS.” He said our foes are certainly religious in nature, contrary to the president’s protestations, and want to take us back to a caliphate of the 7th century. And he said the claim that we have halted the advance of the Islamic State “simply is not true.” When he demanded to know why the president could not recognize a threat that Egypt and Jordan did, the crowd roared in approval. He said: “We did not start this war. We did not choose this war. But we will have the will to finish it.” Making the sound point that “watching all this from afar is Vladimir Putin,” he then went after the president for passivity in the face of Russian aggression. He transitioned to talk about his jobs record in Texas and decried the unemployment rate, which does not include those who stopped looking for work, as a “sham.” And to great applause, he vowed that “we even survived Jimmy Carter. We can survive the Obama years, too.” In the Q and A he did extremely well, delineating his success in lowering pollutants with incentive-based regulations and reiterating that he secured the border when Obama would not. He noticeably hit the president on net neutrality and on foreign affairs, topics on which Walker’s answers were underwhelming. (According to reports, when asked about Walker’s comments on union protesters in the context of national security, Perry said they were “inappropriate.”) Perry made an impressive showing, demonstrating that he knows his stuff on foreign policy and can talk authoritatively about his economic and regulatory accomplishments. It was a shot across the bow of other candidates: This is not the Perry of 2012.