So much for progress on GOP rebranding:
Time to address conservatives from across the country at CPAC is a prime commodity, especially for politicians eyeing a 2016 run — and it’s not being distributed equally.
According to an internal draft of the minute-by-minute schedule at CPAC, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, and Scott Walker are each slated to give 13-minute remarks on the main stage. Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan, however, get eleven minutes to deliver their comments. Former presidential candidate Rick Santorum is scheduled for a mere seven minutes.
The biggest winners in the time lottery are Sarah Palin (16 minutes) and Donald Trump (14 minutes). Palin and Trump are expected to be crowd-pleasers at CPAC: News of their respective appearances caused ticket sales to spike, according to a source.
The bottom line is that the Republican Party seems stuck in the talk radio political culture of demonizing sound bite polemics. Until it offers a more thoughtful face to voters who aren’t in its choir, it’s unlikely to expand its base. To be sure, CPAC is FOR the choir (it is the choir) but independent voters will see the sound clips. And the world is asking: who will Palin say Obama is paling around with today? What new outrageous charge will Trump make?
These clips will provide red meat to conservative talkers, Fox News, and Fox and Friends and most likely cause Joe Scarborough to comment which will give talker Mark Levin another chance to call him “The Morning Shmo.”
And so it goes.
It says a lot about today’s conservatism that Palin and Trump are getting not just prime time but added time.
UPDATE: The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf notes that this is reportedly just a first draft, so these times may not hold and speakers can go over. But I’d argue that the allotment itself says something about preferences.
What does it all mean? I won’t hazard any analysis save that conservatism isn’t served by elevating Donald Trump in this manner. The failure to learn that lesson is baffling given Trump’s behavior in the last election cycle when he spent weeks publicizing birtherism and misled gullible observers about a presidential while relentlessly raising his own profile as a celebrity.
(Ditto…)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.