CPAC 2013: We Stand With Rand!

For Marco Rubio's speech in the main ballroom, there is standing room only. The room is packed. Even as Rubio gives his speech, Young men cruise through the crowd offering STAND WITH RAND placards. They get many, many takers. Rubio gets a standing ovation for his fairly standard stump speech; Rand Paul receives an even more enthusiastic ovation just for showing up, and the crowd around me remains standing for the entire time he speaks.

Paul's message is that Obama's policies of indefinite detention and extrajudicial killings are un-Constitutional. Yes, you and I may have noticed indefinite detention as being an executive power embraced by the Bush administration to much outrage from the left and a smug efficiency by the right, not all that long ago, but no matter: Obama's policies of indefinite detention are what the crowd is pissed about now, and better late then never. This is a Rand Paul crowd through and through. Is it Ron Paul followers eagerly flipping to the new face?

I'm just going to come out and say it: a good three-quarters of the audience, men and women alike, want to f--- Rand Paul. It's that profound a reaction. Rand Paul could have any well-dressed twenty-year-old man in this audience, and all they'd ask in return is that he sign their STAND WITH RAND placards afterwards.

After attempting to suggest to the young folks today that perhaps allowing the government to imprison or kill anyone for unspecified, secret reasons, Paul turns to the meat of the matter. He mentions that Obama's White House cut White House tours to schoolchildren, but somehow only a short time later found $250 million for Egypt. "Not one penny more" to those countries, he demands. He may not have spoken to Lindsey Graham on this one, but I'm thinking the Lindsay drinking-water-for-poor-villages idea is right out. He snickers at spending for the sort of crazy science experiments that conservative lawmakers delight in snickering against, in this case $3 million for researching the effects of meth on monkeys. That would indeed be irritating if the research was simply into whether giving monkeys meth was a bad idea; if there was, perhaps, something the scientists were attempting to learn about meth addiction in humans Paul doesn't let on. He says the GOP must embrace "liberty in both the economic and the personal sphere"'good applause for the ambiguous statement, but the examples he then gives suggest most of the breakthrough GOP platform in that regard would be the same things said, only with the word liberty thrown about a bit more.

His message is anti-tax, anti-spending and that's it. There is no room for complexity in the argument; government bad, kill it with fire, end of story. He zooms out quickly to another brief ovation, and the room drains of people in one big flood. The next panel here is on Benghazi, but the introductory speech is mostly drowned out by the exiting conversations. The volunteers cruise the room again, picking up leftover STAND WITH RAND signs for later use.