The last CPAC panel I attended was the “Divisions Within the Family,” panel, which attemted to address Iraq, the drug war, free trade, Cuba, and gay marriage — all over the course of an hour. That’s too bad. If they’d given an hour, or even a half hour, to any of the those five topics on their own, it would have been more interesting than most of the rest of the conference. Instead, all five topics were crammed into one behind-schedule half hour, which itself was tucked in to the very back-end of the conference (only Sen. George Allen’s wrap-up speech followed). My guess is that CPAC aims to project unity, and you don’t do that by giving fissures within the movement a lot of attention.

As a result, what promised to be the most interesting panel turned out to be the most aggravating. Ten speakers were given three minutes each to make their case, and the Q&A was limited to just a few questions. The condensed format also meant that we wouldn’t be getting A-list speakers on any of these topics. A few were still good. Most were pretty bad.

The rundown:

The Drug War

The Drug Policy Alliance’s Ethan Nadelmann spoke for the good guys. He did a bang-up job. He hit most of the important points, delivered his speech with passion, and hit his climax with the line, “if my grandmother is sick and dying, who is the government to tell her what kind of medication she can take to make her feel better?” Quite a bit of applause.

I’m still trying to figure out what in the world CPAC’s organizers were thinking in booking Nadelmann’s opponent, Richard Poe. Poe is author of the book Hillary’s Secret War. He’s a frumpy, sullen, angry-looking fellow who’s also an associate of conservative firebrand David Horowitz. Poe works on Horowitz’s latest project, Discover the Network, an online database that purports to show how all the leftist celebrities, non-profits, NGO’s, think tanks, and media figures are connected, using some nifty programming to do it. My problem with the site — in addition to the ad hominem nature of guilt by association — is that it never really elaborates on the actual connection between the various villains. If a staffer leaves the ACLU and comes to do criminal justice work for Cato, does that make Cato part of the vast left-wing conspiracy? What if, say, Nadine Strossen writes a chapter for an edited Cato book? What if Cato gets money from the Scaife Foundation, too? Does that make us left-wing or right-wing?

I bring all of this up because argumentum ad funderam — as Julian’s prone to calling it — was Poe’s entire case against Nadelmann.

Poe began by stating he’s a libertarian. He then rambled for a couple of minutes about how poor people are particularly succeptible to bad arguments (I’m still not sure where he was going with this). He then concluded by saying that the Drug Policy Alliance is funded by George Soros and that, therefore, nothing DPA or Ethan Nadelmann has to say is worth listening to.

Please. If this is what Horowitz and his associates plan to do with their new project, it’s utterly useless. Smearing people by association is sleazy.

The odd thing is that during the Q&A, a student asked Poe how he could call himself a libertarian and still favor drug prohibition. Poe answered that he must have misstated himself. He does favor decriminalization, or at least supports reprioritizing our drug laws.

So Poe wasn’t really debating Nadelmann at all. He was there for the sole purpose of pointing out that Nadelmann’s organization gets money from Soros.

I’m not sure what to make of this, other than that it’s a crappy argument. Nadelmann recently wrote a cover story for National Review arguing for the decriminalization of marijuana. Was Poe’s spot on the panel someone at CPAC’s way of shaming the magazine? Or was it CPAC’s organizers’ way of conceding the drug issue? It’s clear CPAC didn’t want an actual debate on drug policy, or they would have done at least a preliminary screening of Poe’s position, and found that he actually opposes the drug war as it’s currently administered.

Also, by Poe’s reasoning, does its publication of an article by Nadelman make National Review part of the vast left wing conspiracy, too? Will that put the magazine in Horowitz’s database?

Awful.

Free Trade

On the pro-side was Larry Ward, who runs a company called Interactive Political Media and gave a throughly incoherrent and ill-prepared presentation. To be fair, it appeared to me that the panelists were originally told they’d be getting more time than they actually got, and were pared back when the conference fell behind scheduled. Still, I’m baffled why CPAC couldn’t find someone to make a better case for free trade than this guy, who seemed to be more interested in promoting his company.

The only two discerinible argument-like morsels I could cull from Ward’s speech were:

(1) Remember when everyone feared Japan in the 1980s, and told us to stop buying Japanese products? Well, Japan was the last country to attack us, and they haven’t attacked us since. So free trade must be good.

(2) States trade with each other. And states don’t fight wars with each other. Free trade must be good.

I suppose Ward was trying to make the point that open trade facilitates the kind of familiarity and business relationships that make it difficult for citizens of different countries to hate one another. Or that once the coroporate sector of one country is heavily invested in another, it gets increasingly difficult for those two countries to go to war. He just made the point really, really poorly.

His opponent was frequent AFF contributor Tim Carney. Carney wasn’t against trade per se, but pointed out that given heavy government subsidies and the corporate welfare flowing freely from the Commerce Department, Import-Export Bank, and various other federal organizations, free trade isn’t really free, it’s taxpayer-subsidized. It’s a good point, though it’s not really an argument against free trade so much as an argument against the Commerce Dept., the Im-Ex bank, and the various other subsidy and corporate welfare programs. I was less convinced by Carney’s assertion that free trade undermines U.S. sovereignty, but it was at least articulate and well-delivered.

Gay Marriage

Before the debate, a hateful little grop called the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property handed out a flyer filled with bold-faced type, copious underlining, and bullet points urging that same-sex marriage isn’t an issue conservatives should even be debating. It conveniently provided questions for audience members to pose to Christopher Baron, the representative from the Log Cabin Republicans.

To his credit, Baron didn’t even make the case for gay marriage. He made the case that gay marriage is a federalism issue. He urged conservatives to stick with their tendency (and I call it a tendency because it’s clearly not a principle) to let the states govern themselves, particularly when it comes to determining their own policy on marriage, family, and relationships — a 200+ year tradition in the United States.

His opponent, a fellow named Kevin Blier from the Center for American Cultural Renewal, misstated the Log Cabin Republicans’ position on the issue, and generally inveighed against the cultural left’s attempts to impose its well on conservative values.

The fun came in the Q&A. First up, a sweaty, angry, three-piece-suited man who could easily have been an extra from the black-and-white side of Pleasantville. His question to Baron was taken almost word for word from the flyer we were given before the panel started, and was delivered more like a fist than a query.

He was followed by a student from Liberty University who seemed more interested in using his microphone time to express how much he hated gay people than asking an actual question. I didn’t write down a word-for-word transcription, but it was along the lines of “you people got your legalized sodomy, your inheritance rights, you can visit each other in the hospital, what more do you gays want?”

Baron, a little agitated at the two questions, admirably stuck to his talking points. He said he wanted the states to be free to determine their own marriage and family policy, and not have that policy dictated to them by the federal government. And that, he said, is a position conservatives ought to be able to support.

Blier left immediately after giving his presentation, and wasn’t around for the Q&A.

Iraq

Again, it was really disappointing that we were only given six minutes of debate on U.S. foreign policy. Though I obviously think he’s wrong, the American Spectator’s Jed Babbin probably gave the best presentation on the panel. He was animated, funny, articulate, and it probably didn’t hurt that 90% of the audience agreed with him.

Ivan Eland had a previous engagement, so John Utley of the Mises Institute filled in on the anti-war side. Utley seemed flustered by the lack of time, and unfortunately, he too resorted to ad hominem argument, and didn’t really even convince me, much less anyone on the fence, or who might have disagreed with him.

The only arguments Utley managed to get off were:

(1) The people who favored the war tended to be people who hadn’t spent much time in foreign countries, particularly in the developing and Islamic world. And that people like him, who had spent time in such areas, tended to be against war. I’m not even sure that’s true. But even if it is, it doesn’t address the merits or failings of this particular war.

(2) He also said conservatives would oppose the war if they educated themselves on who benefits from it. Again, that says nothing about the merits or demerits of Gulf War II, or about whether or not this particular war was just or necessary.

He then ran off a list of websites for further reading.

Three minutes is far too little time make even a preliminary case against this war, particularly to an audience that’s overwhelmingly in support of it.

Cuba

Former Ambassador Dennis Hayes squared off against the eccentric Ed Hudgins, from the Objectivist Center. Both are solid public speakers (I’ve heard both before), but again, it’s impossible to debate a subject as complicated as the benefits and drawbacks of a trade embargo against a totalitarian regime in the course of three minutes. Neither made all that compelling a case, and the issue didn’t even come up during the Q&A.

All in all, pretty disappointing. I’ve only been to one other CPAC, but in talking to a few attendees, this was the first time anyone in favor of ending drug prohibition or gay marriage was given some stage time. I guess that’s progress. But it would be nice to have seen some actual debate instead of hurried recitations of talking points.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 20th, 2005 at 7:03 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.