CPAC was Ruling Class Republicans circling the wagons. Mitch Daniels scorning talk radio was red meat for state media- Rush

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2/14/11, "CPAC Review: Ruling-Class Republicans Still Don't Get It," RushLimbaugh.com "Now, nobody would disagree that for a movement to grow you need people from all over the place to join the movement. So I didn't take personally Mitch Daniels saying we need to move beyond the audiences of people on talk radio. It's in fact smart but in the process of doing so, you don't diss the people who are already audiences of those shows, you don't say that they're irrelevant or unnecessary, who won elections for your party year after year after year, and all this, of course, done to impress the mainstream media. The problem with CPAC, frankly, is that rather than promote traditional conservative principles -- maybe even with new strategies, that's fine and dandy -- rather than do that, the principles are now up for grabs, the definition of a conservative is up for grabs. And people who have had very little to do with election results since last November are now lecturing everybody on how to move forward, and that's what CPAC was and it just kind of didn't compute.... But if you look at last year, if you go into the campaign and the election last year there's an unmistakable conservative ascendancy happening in this country. Even independents were flocking in the direction of conservatism. Now, they had to vote Republican. They didn't want to vote for Democrats in November. But the move was clearly to conservatism, not the Republican Party. But at CPAC, you didn't get the impression here that there was a conservative ascendancy going on. You had a lot of people saying, "We gotta do something about that faction of conservatism, we gotta do something about that faction of conservatism, we gotta move beyond this faction of conservatism." I think the ruling class has circled the wagons and used CPAC to do it. Social conservatives were dissed again at CPAC. And the ruling-class cheering every speech made, every comment made that dissed the social conservatives. I thought with what had happened last fall, I mean, Cheney got heckled, called a war criminal and a draft dodger at CPAC. Sorry, that's not the CPAC that I've always thought of or known. A guy like Dick Cheney gets heckled and called a war criminal. ... We had would-be candidates promoted by the Washington ruling class. We had some candidates dumping on talk radio. We had Mitch Daniels saying, (paraphrasing) "We need to move beyond the audiences of Rush and Sean," and so forth and the C-SPAN viewers, we need to move beyond that. There was this constant drumbeat that came from a lot of people, from Jeb Bush, from Mitch Daniels, a lot of people, "We gotta do something about these social conservatives. We gotta dump this," and I just have a question. Does the left ever dump any of its factions? Does the left ever hold a convention and say, "You know what, we gotta get rid of the Huffington Post people," or "We gotta deemphasize the Daily Kos"? Does the left ever do anything it does to appeal to its enemies, to try to be loved and associated by its enemies? "... ------------------------------------------------------------- Mitch Daniels served in the George W. Bush administration and is a former chief of staff for Senator Richard Lugar. He is by no means a fresh face on the scene. ed.