While the 2012 Presidential election is some distance away, the Conservative Political Action Conference held in Washington, DC gave us our first look at what the Republican primary might look like.
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Conservative activists, united in opposition to President Barack Obama’s agenda, celebrated their rising political prospects on Friday and confidently predicted big Republican gains in November’s congressional elections.
Christian Broadcasting Network
The annual Conservative Political Action Conference is underway in Washington, D.C., and this year’s focus aims to kick out the Democrats and take back Congress.
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At an annual conference of grassroots conservatives, activists promised to crank up the pressure on Obama and his fellow Democrats and marveled at the political turnaround since he entered the White House in January 2009 on a wave of goodwill and high expectations.
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Glenn Beck, a hero of the political right and the closing speaker at a conference of political conservatives here, offered a sweeping denunciation of progressivism on Saturday, calling it a cancer that must be cut out of the nation’s political system.
Mr. Paul, who inspired an intense following when he ran for president in 2008, swept the conference’s presidential straw poll. With 31 percent of the nearly 2,400 votes cast, he finished ahead of Mr. Romney, who won the straw poll last year and captured 22 percent of the vote on Saturday.
Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, who did not attend the conference, was third, with 7 percent of the vote, and Mr. Pawlenty received 6 percent.
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At the same time, conservatives and Republican leaders face a challenge as they try to harness the Tea Party movement’s energy and sudden influx of new faces and views. Speakers showed no hesitation in denouncing Republicans, often with the same intensity they brought in denouncing Democrats; Tea Party leaders made clear that Republicans could no longer count on the automatic backing of conservatives.
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The conservatives who flocked to CPAC last weekend might not have seen eye to eye on everything, but one thing they did seem to agree on was that the conference’s famous “straw poll” didn’t really mean all that much─especially after organizers revealed that the winner, with 31 percent of the vote, was none other than 2008 presidential candidate and long time libertarian congressman Ron Paul of Texas.
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Reuters: Former Vice President Dick Cheney rallied fellow Republican conservatives on Thursday, predicting gains in November congressional elections and declaring that Barack Obama will be a “one-term president.”
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The religious right has spoken, and it wants Mike Huckabee. The former governor of Arkansas and Fox News personality won the Values Voter Summit’s 2012 presidential straw poll on Saturday, scoring more than double the votes of his closest competitors.
Thedailybeast.com
Nevada’s Republican Senator John Ensign is in the news again today.
News has leaked out that Ensign’s parents gave $96,000 in cash ‘gifts’ to Ensign’s former lover and her family. Some may interpret the gifts as bribes. Some will interpret the gifts as bribes.
Ensign said recently he had an affair with a former member of his campaign staff. He resigned as the fourth-ranking Republican leader in the Senate, but has said he will not resigtn his seat in the Senate.
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