LP reaches out to conservatives at CPAC event in Washington
LP News article
By Daniel Cloud
The Libertarian Party was a cosponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 17-19 at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. -- using the opportunity to reach out to other organizations, to get ideas for outreach and to tell fiscal conservatives that there is an alternative to the Republican Party.
More than 90 organizations sponsored the event, including the Objectivist Center, Americans for Tax Reform, the NRA, the National Taxpayers Union, the ACLU, Heritage Foundation, Bureaucrash, the Drug Policy Alliance and a host of others.
According to CPAC's Web site, the event is the nation's oldest and largest gathering of conservatives, having been held annually for more than 30 years.
"While we aren't aligned with the political views of these other groups on all subjects, the other groups didn't necessarily line up on every issue, either," said LP Executive Director Joe Seehusen. "By taking part in this CPAC conference, we hope to show that Libertarians are the true fiscal conservatives -- much more so than the Republicans are."
Speakers at the conference included libertarian-friendly people such as former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Adam Thierer of the Cato Institute, as well as other such notables as Karl Rove, author Ann Coulter, Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. Vice President Dick Cheney spoke at the presidential banquet.
Sam New, who organized the LP's activities at the conference, said, "The CPAC conference is one of the biggest outreach exhibitions of political action groups in the Washington, D.C. area, with about 4,500 people attending."
"I feel we were very well received," New said. "We met a lot of people who are either supportive of our ideas or who simply support having an alternative to the big government ideal put forward by the Republicans and Democrats."
Seehusen agreed, saying conference attendees were "surprised, but glad to see us."
"I think this is a big step forward for the LP," he said. "Our profile has been low for some time, and we were able to showcase our party in a positive light to many people and groups, including a large number of students and small business owners.
"As I spoke with representatives of various groups, they frequently noted that their belief systems include libertarian ideas, especially regarding their support of limited power for government and appreciation for individual rights. And many of them stopped by our booth to learn more."
The party's booth was manned by LP headquarters staff, including New, Development Coordinator Jessica Neno Wilson, development associates Kelly Kohut and Margaret Taylor, office assistant Matthew Dailey, intern John St. Leger and volunteer Pere Garlinghouse.
They handed out copies of LP News, the "New Vision" brochure and issue-specific brochures about gun rights, taxes and ending the welfare state, Wilson said.
"We also received requests for information from more than 100 people," she added. "Both Sam New and I were also able to meet staffers with other organizations and spoke with many students who had never before encountered the LP."
The opportunity to meet people who otherwise would have been unfamiliar with libertarianism was a primary reason for the party to take part in CPAC, Seehusen said.
Michael McKay, an LP member and donor from Fairfield, Iowa, attended several events with Seehusen. He noted that "as the conference went on, more and more people kept coming up to us, saying they're leaning toward libertarian principles."
Wilson said she spoke with many young people who "call themselves conservative, but are learning that they are really libertarian."
"Many people said 'I'm with the Libertarians on everything but the immigration issue,'" she said -- to which she responded, "Wouldn't it be better to be with a political party whose platform you agree with on 80 percent of the issues, rather than with a party with whom you disagree on so many other issues?"
This concept had apparently not occurred to most of them, she added, noting that a number of requests for more information came from people who acknowledged that they already agree with the party's stance on many issues.
Communications Director George Getz also had an opportunity to discuss the LP's stance on the immigration issue.
Getz spoke with FoxNews.com reporter Kelly Vlahos, "who frequently calls to get an LP perspective for her stories," he said. "Kelly was doing an article about President Bush's 'guest worker' program, which would grant temporary work visas to some immigrants. She was having difficulty finding conservatives in favor of Bush's proposal."
During the interview, Getz was able to explain that Libertarians "know that immigration control is just another big-government program that can't work. In the process of rounding up a few thousand immigrants, the government will end up harassing employers, breaking up families and forcing every American to carry a national ID card."
And those are some of the issues Libertarians were able to focus on at CPAC, Getz said. "Libertarians support the right to work, we're pro-family, and we're against a national ID card. On those issues, we can appeal to the true conservatives, who have been abandoned by the big-government neo-conservatives."
In the same vein, Seehusen spent about 20 minutes on the air with Martha Zoller, a talk show host with Gainesville, Ga.-based radio station WDUN, telling an estimated 350,000 listeners "that George Bush is a socialist, and the Democrat and Republican parties are two rival socialist factions, vying for your money and freedom."
At the same time, Seehusen said, he and other Libertarians "were able to strengthen old connections with such groups as the Leadership Institute and the Americans for Tax Reform."
"Over the course of these three days, we were also able to build some new relationships for the party, by spending time with people like Wayne LaPierre of the NRA and with leaders of many other organizations," Seehusen said. "We were able to find common ground, to talk about ways we can work together and help each other.
"This is the first time we've done a function like this in some time, and we put up a good presentation, both through our booth and through personal interactions with a wide variety of individuals.
"But it was also beneficial for us to study the other organizations that were there, to benchmark successful groups and see how they reach out to the public. By seeing how other groups successfully market themselves, I think we learned a great deal about how the LP can more effectively reach out to conservatives." |
