Conservatives rally at CPAC

Last Thursday and Friday, I broadcast my radio show from Washington, D.C., from CPAC – the Conservative Political Action Conference.

For Americans shell shocked at the rapid collapse of opportunity America, of our constitutional meritocracy, at the wave after wave of trillion dollar bailouts and handouts, the subsidy of failure and irresponsible borrowing from not-yet-born generations, CPAC was our rallying point.

Organizers expected some 7,000 grass-roots conservative activists for a conference that started in 1973 with a few dozen. Instead some 9,000 showed up.

Most heartening was the outpouring of young people. Nearly half of attendees were younger than 30, most of them college students. Cynics noted that perhaps these younger voters finally realized that the Obama "change" would require higher taxes for the rest of their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren.

These younger Americans certainly voiced opposition to Obama's proposals to guarantee security but pay for it with record debt and stifling big-government regulation. They were looking for leadership to reclaim their birthright – an America of equal opportunity, of liberty. They found that leadership among themselves.

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In fact, all attendees at CPAC this year appeared liberated from the need to defend an incumbent Republican president who had betrayed conservative principles again and again (farm bill, Medicare prescription benefit, open borders, etc.) and who defended the big bank bailout by famously saying that he had "sacrificed free market principles to save the free market." Speakers who stood up for free peoples and free markets – traditional American philosophy until recent years and events – were heartily cheered.

Reflecting that same spirit over the same weekend, "tea parties" (a la the Boston Tea Party) were held in dozens of American cities and towns. Organized by every day, hard-working common-sense Americans in the real spirit of bipartisanship, these "We the People" events galvanized opposition to the "change" Obama has in mind for America.

These two phenomena – CPAC and the tea parties – tell me that, despite the cheerleading MSM, the reality of Obama's plans is sinking in.

The president says his plan cuts taxes for 95 percent of Americans. A small tax cut for even people who pay no taxes is not a tax cut. It is a new welfare program. Worse yet, most people couldn't help but notice that the new tax on greenhouse gases would raise taxes on every American who uses gasoline, electricity, natural gas or coal. And, speaking of welfare, Obama's "stimulus" bill would repeal work and legal residency requirements for welfare programs, thereby undoing Clinton-era welfare reforms and expanding welfare entitlements to illegal aliens.

Not only are Americans waking up to the true nature of the "change," they are dumbfounded at the cost.

If you spent $1 million per day every day since the resurrection of Jesus Christ, you would still not have spent $1 trillion.

If you gave away $1 every second, it would take you 32,000 years to give away $1 trillion.

Obama wants to spend $2.8 trillion next year alone – most of it borrowed – from the Chinese.

On the plane home from CPAC, I was reading Rick Atkinson's "The Day of Battle," which movingly describes the allies' invasion of Italy in 1943 during World War II.

The Americans of that era are widely celebrated, and Atkinson describes in poetic detail why. These everyday Americans, far from home, encountered the bloodiest fighting of the European War with a determination for victory that grew out of a confidence in their own capability to endure, to triumph or to die trying.

These World War II warriors, only two generations ago, were steeped in the American creed of individual responsibility, proud of their country, humble, united – and ultimately victorious.

Too many of today's Americans are taught victimhood and entitlement, are saturated in a popular culture that derides all that traditional America has provided, and believe that government will provide guarantees against the need to strive, work hard and overcome to succeed.

But not all. Watching the eager, enthusiastic, young conservative activists pour into the CPAC meetings, I have renewed hope that the American legacy of liberty has found a new generation of defenders.