(GUARDIAN) — The crowd at CPAC 2012 sure doesn't seem like Mitt Romney territory.
Yes, there's the college Republican set and the other masses of students bused in from God-knows-where looking to ensconce themselves in careers within the Republican machine who will be happy to do Mitt Romney's bidding, if that's what's called for. And then, there's the young proprietor of a small website I talked to outside, who says, while smoking his own dark Nicaraguan cigar – not the "$3 crap" they give you at CPAC's cigar-and-scotch party, he assures me – that he's perfectly fine with Romney and simply enjoys being here.
But these people don't count. What do the real conservatives of CPAC want? The ones who distribute the creepy, unsigned "Is Marco Rubio pro-immigrant?" fliers, run the NRA booth, gift every person within a mile radius free copies of supreme birther Joseph Farah's Tea Party Manifesto, and generally refuse to "settle".
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