Limbaugh, Ryan, and "33 Minutes" Highlight Heritage Foundation's President's Club Events in Washington

Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending my 11th Heritage Foundation President's Club Meeting at the Ronald Reagan Building (where else?) in Washington. Here are some of the highlights from yesterday's events and my perspectives:

• Attended the Young President's Club (YPC) luncheon with about 200 YPC members in attendance, about double the total who showed up to the November 2008 luncheon. Heritage announced that it is starting a new YPC membership drive to attract even greater numbers. The lunch talk featured Rob Bluey, Director of Online Strategy at Heritage, and Katherine Jean Lopez, National Review Online Editor. Kudos to John Fogarty, Director of Donor Relations, and his staff at Heritage for really trying to make a dent in the youth movement at Heritage. This has been an observed "gap" of Heritage's for many years and is an issue that I have written to Heritage senior executives about in the past. Glad to see they are finally going after the 18-25 demographic.


• After lunch and back in the main hall, Heritage Foundation President Dr. Ed Feulner discussed the current state of Conservatism in Washington and what activities are underway and planned at Heritage. He noted that Heritage has been working very hard over the past year to ramp up its Internet 2.0 efforts, which includes social networking on Facebook and Twitter. He was especially proud to announce that Heritage has added more than 110,000 new members to its rolls in the past year. In addition, the conference dinner would be attended by more than 1,000 members, the largest attended Heritage President's Club dinner ever. Of that total, about 250 YPC members would be attending.


• Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was most definitely the highlight of the early afternoon session as he provided his thoughts and ideas on Jack Kemp (whom he worked for...), the Obama Administration, and the Federal Reserve's monetary policy, to name a few. He is extremely articulate, has a solid game plan for addressing the Obama spending and tax plans, and looks like the "real deal" as a future national player in the Conservative Party. He received a standing ovation from the packed ballroom following his no-notes, no-teleprompter speech.


• In the late afternoon, Heritage members were treated to a viewing of the 60-minute version of "33 Minutes -- Protecting America in the New Missile Age", a documentary highlighting the need for a missile defense system. This is one of the most intense and convincing political documentaries of all time and should be seen by all Americans. If you have not seen the film, please visit the site (link above) and watch the trailer on-line. Better yet, sign up to get information about local showings in your area of the country. Heritage is in negotiations with several networks regarding on-air viewings. Great job by Heritage on this important issue!


• Before the dinner reception, I had the opportunity to purchase a signed copy of Heritage's Senior Communications Fellow Rebecca Hagelin's new book, "30 Ways in 30 Day to Save Your Family". Rebecca has been an invaluable asset to Heritage over the past several years as its VP for Communications. Most recently, she served as Executive Producer of "33 Minutes" and now has written her second book on pro-family issues.


• The nightcap of the day's events, as always, is the dinner and keynote speech. Before a packed atrium at the Reagan Building, Dr. Feulner welcomed the group and made special mention of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' attendance, which drew a standing ovation from the audience. Unfortunately, Rush Limbaugh was running late for the event, but did get there after the dinner and dessert and hit a home run with an hour-long speech. The message of his speech is that the Conservative Party/Reagan Revolution is not dead and that the party needs to be a leader and teacher for Americans about First Principles and why much of the Obama plan will not work. He stressed that we cannot simply go out and ask Americans what they want and build a party platform around those responses. I will try and post portions of Rush's speech as they become available on the Net.

This year's Heritage Foundation President's Club Spring Meeting provided a tremendous boost to Conservatives who might be depressed over what has transpired in Washington since January 20. Although Conservatives are down right now, it was stressed throughout the day that the political tides can change VERY quickly in Washington depending on which way the wind (and economy...) are blowing. As always, Dr. Feulner and his entire staff at Heritage put on a fantastic show. I'm already looking forward to the November meeting!

Mark Levin vs. David Frum

Fantastic post by "Hogan" on RedState.com against the pseudo-Republicans who went after Rush Limbaugh and his speech at CPAC last Saturday... Also, you can listen to an on-air debate between Mark Levin and David Frum by clicking here.

A note to David Frum, Ross Douthat, David Brooks and every other self-important, self-designated savior of the Republican Party… PLEASE STOP.

Please stop telling us what is wrong with… well, US. Seriously, I just cannot take it any more.

It’s like Yankees who come South because it’s generally such a nice place to live and then tell us we’re all a bunch of idiots and that we need to “do it like they used to do it back in Detroit.” Spare me – move back to Detroit and leave me alone.

We all recognize the problems we face as a nation, and as a Party. You want a frigging medal because you, too, can read polls and recognize that we need to sort out the Hispanic-gap, the suburban-soccer-mom-gap, the generational gap, the new-young-christian-gap or any other gap the numbers indicate? No freaking crap, geniuses. We just want to start with principle instead of a craptacularly stupid effort to buy-off their votes.

I can tolerate (while vehemently disagreeing with) your random ideas about traffic jams and ramping up police forces, your gas tax to pay for other tax cuts and a green agenda, your musings about FDR somehow being the model for 21st Century conservatism, and I can even tolerate your boring books that some Republicans read to prove they are “introspective” and thoughtful about the movement.

What makes me want to scream – and I mean a pull-my-hair-out, punch-someone-in-the-face kind of scream – is your self-indulgent, holier-than-thou proclamations about how wrong most of us “conservatives” are simply because you have seen the light after all this time writing for the New York Times, all of 5 minutes working for the Bush Administration, or all this time well, doing very little other than writing a book called Grand New Party and putting yourself out as the savior of a movement you apparently want little to do with.

I do not want – as I suspect most Republicans do not want – to suggest that we cannot have a fine debate about ideas within the movement. We always have. We always will. There is nothing new about that. I do it all the time with a great many smart conservatives. And you three have offered some fine ideas along the way, when not spending your time trying to re-make us.

Yes, we are a big tent… but we are a big tent with principles. Those principles vary a little bit, but there are large, common threads – freedom, personal responsibility, limited government and an appropriate deference to the Almighty are just a few of those principles the VAST majority of conservatives and Republicans I know embrace.

I love being a conservative and am proud to call myself one – so please do us a favor… quit calling yourself conservative, moving the goalposts on us, and then complaining we are on a different field. If you want to have a discussion of ideas, gentlemen, put them out there and we may find common ground. But STOP the condescending babbling about how “bad” we are and recognize that life is too short to go around being pompous and angry in your self-promotion.

p.s. If you are wondering what triggered this particular reaction, it was this post by David Frum, but it was only because it was the most recent… it could have been any one of hundreds of others…

Do Conservatives Need to Get Beyond Reagan?

The following is adapted from a speech delivered by Rush Limbaugh on December 4, 2008, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., on the occasion of the ninth annual Hillsdale College Churchill Dinner.

THERE ARE ongoing discussions and debates among conservatives about the kind of president Barack Obama will prove to be, and about how they should react to him. But there is a larger and more important debate going on within conservatism—a debate about what conservatism is. Remarkably, we are hearing from a lot of people who are thought to be conservatives that conservatives need to "get beyond Reagan." After all, these people say, "The Reagan era is over." And the liberal media love to print their articles and broadcast their pronouncements to this effect. My response is, well, yes, the Reagan era is over in the sense that it has been 20 years since Reagan was president. But the funny thing is, I never heard the liberals saying that because the era of FDR was over-it ended in 1945-that they needed to "get beyond FDR." They didn't say that 35 years later when Reagan was first elected, or when he was reelected in 1984. They didn't say that when the liberals lost Congress in the 1994 election. Nor did they say it after the 2000 or 2004 elections. Instead, they kept arguing and fighting for the ideas they believe in. And now Mr. Obama is plausibly promising to revive the era of FDR.

So why are some so-called conservatives today arguing that we need to "get beyond Reagan," by which they mean that we need to abandon the ideas that Reagan stood for? To understand the roots of this argument, I think we only need to look back to the years when Reagan first emerged onto the national scene. There was a lot of resentment at that time among many of the elites in the Republican Party because Reagan hadn't gone to the right schools, he didn't come from the right part of the country, he had been an actor rather than a lawyer, he was a bumbling dunce, he was an extremist who was too far outside the mainstream to win, and so on. People have been making these kinds of arguments for a long time. They were saying that conservatives needed to get beyond Reagan even before the Reagan era began. A few of them are the same people. Many of them are new. But what they have in common is that none of them agree with the principles that Reagan stood for. And I would argue that this means that they are not conservatives.

Today the get-beyond-Reagan arguments are often put in so-called pragmatic terms of needing to create blocs of voters who will support the Republican Party. And in order to accomplish this, all that conservatives have to do, these self-proclaimed smart people say,iis embrace the idea of big government, because that's what the American people want and because only so-called big-government conservatives will be able to create blocs of voters by spending money to do them favors. But in answer to this, one has to ask the question-and I'm being a real pragmatist myself here-what's left for government to spend these days? It's already bailing people out right and left with taxpayer money that the government doesn't have. The spigot has been turned on under President Bush. The Obama administration, we can presume, is going to be even more generous in terms of bailouts. But honestly, when we look at auto executives being grilled on TV by liberal members of Congress about their irresponsibility, can we take it seriously? Has anyone ever been as irresponsible with money—and in their case other people's money—than these very same self-righteous members of Congress?

As history has amply demonstrated, down the line the kind of central planning that Mr. Bush has begun and that Mr. Obama plans to escalate isn't going to work. Although it may succeed in increasing the control of government over people's lives—which is how many liberals these days seem to define prosperity—it will fail miserably in restoring economic health to America. So in fact, during a time of economic trouble like this when liberals are in charge of both elected branches of government, conservatives have a golden opportunity to reintroduce to the American people the free market ideas and policies that have made our country the greatest and most prosperous country in human history.

My first point, then, is that there is no pragmatic reason today for conservatives to abandon the ideas of Reagan. It is worth remembering, after all, that despite the warnings of Republican "pragmatists" in the economically bleak 1970s that Reagan was too far outside the mainstream ever to be successful politically, Reagan won the presidency in two landslides-and that in 1994, his party took over the House of Representatives, for the first time in 40 years, using Reagan-like arguments.

But there is a second and more important point to be made in response to the argument that conservatives should get beyond Reagan. The main idea that animated Reagan wasn't anti-communism or supply side economics. Reagan's main idea was the main idea of the American founding—the idea of individual liberty—and the policies that he supported, both internationally and domestically, grew from that. America was founded on the idea that our individual freedoms derive from God, not from government, and that government should protect those freedoms and never violate them. Reagan argued, and history has shown, that America does best when it is true to its original idea. It does best when its people are left free to work in their individual self-interest—not meant in the sense of being selfish, but in the sense that they are left free to work to improve their own lives and the lives of their families, and for the good of their communities and of the nation at large. The biggest problem with the argument that conservatives should get beyond Reagan, then, is that the idea of individual liberty will never go out of style as long as America exists. To argue that the Reagan era is over is to argue that the era of freedom is over. And to argue that conservatives should abandon Reagan's principles is to argue that they should stop being conservatives.

There is no such thing, at least in America, as "big-government conservatism." A government that abides by the Constitution and protects our God-given freedoms is by definition limited. Rather than carving out blocs of voters by surrendering their principles, conservatives need to continue to tell the American people as a whole that the ideas of individual liberty and limited government are right and that the policies that come from those ideas work best to produce prosperity. Conservatives don't need to reinvent themselves. They need the courage to be once again who they were.

Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College