Five Observations from the RedState Gathering

by Tim Alberta

Denver — Some 500 conservative activists convened here over the weekend for the annual RedState Gathering, an event that traditionally functions as a pep rally for the Republican grassroots.

This year, though, it felt like a funeral.

The mood was decidedly dour as attendees spoke — from the main stage, at their tables, and over adult beverages — in disbelieving tones about the state of the presidential race and the inadequacies of their party’s nominee, Donald Trump.

The event offered a unique window into how conservative activists are coping with 2016, and how they might hope to pick up the pieces after November 8. There were telling moments. At one point, the hosts aired a video message from Speaker Paul Ryan in which he spoke about the future of conservatism. When it ended, only a handful of people in the ballroom applauded.

Here are five observations from the event:

1. There Was Tension over Trump

RedState.com, the popular conservative blog, has earned a reputation for being passionately anti-Trump. This largely owes to former editor Erick Erickson and current editor Leon Wolf, both of whom have been outspoken critics of the Republican nominee. One might have assumed, then, that most — if not all — attendees at their conference would share their opposition to Trump. But that assumption was proven wrong.

In a reminder that the conservative movement is far from monolithic, there was a respectable contingent of Trump supporters in the crowd, at least one of them wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, to the chagrin of his neighbors. The clear majority in attendance were Trump detractors, however, and some of them were not shy about voicing their displeasure with his loyalists in the room.

At one point Saturday afternoon, Wolf, who emceed the event, opened the floor for an audience discussion due to a speaker’s cancellation. The session quickly devolved into a debate over Trump, and grew somewhat tense when a Trump supporter stayed at the microphone and continued talking after being told to give others an opportunity. Several audience members shouted at him to sit down. At another point, when a woman stood to argue that he is preferable to Hillary Clinton despite his many flaws, someone yelled over her, “The lesser of two evils is still evil!”

After a period of this, Wolf — who reiterated his own opposition to Trump, but emphasized that he understood the pro-Trump positions being articulated — ended the discussion, sensing the mounting friction in the room.

2. Ben Sasse Stole the Show

Attendees were buzzing all weekend long in anticipation of a Saturday night speech from Nebraska’s freshman senator, who gained sudden prominence in the spring by denouncing both Trump and Clinton as “dumpster fires.”

He did not disappoint.

In a sharp and confidently delivered speech, Sasse outlined his philosophical support for the government’s role in dealing with “small-ball policy issues” (biannual budgeting), and “epic policy issues” (cyber-warfare, entitlement reform), while entrusting the “foundational issues” (preserving and promoting “the American idea”) to families and communities.

Sasse, who cuts a unique profile as both an aw-shucks Midwesterner and an Ivy League-educated former college president, successfully came across as both intellectual and relatable. At one point, he touched on “Constitutional literalism” after sharing stories of his teenage daughter’s “icky” summer job at a Nebraska ranch. Striking this balance with the Republican base has proven exceedingly difficult for many talented politicians. But Sasse, in introducing himself to an influential constituency, pulled it off.

[email protected] just gave one of the most important speeches I’ve ever heard,” tweeted conservative commentator Guy Benson. “Let’s get this guy in front of a crowd.” (The only negative: Sasse’s presentation went 55 minutes, including Q&A time, inviting jokes about how senators love the sound of their own voice.)

Sasse played down his political ambitions, expressing disgust with senators who cling to power and spend their lives in elected office. But the Nebraska senator was already being discussed as a rising star who could challenge for the GOP nomination in 2020. Saturday’s speech will only further fuel that speculation.

And it’s worth nothing that Sasse’s biography — a Cornhusker fan who homeschools his three children — could play awfully well in a certain neighboring state.

3. Cory Gardner Had an Uneven Performance

Gardner is universally viewed as one of the Republican party’s brightest young legislators — a telegenic, articulate former representative who was viewed as a potential speaker of the House before embarking on a successful and widely celebrated Senate run in 2014.

Gardner’s national footprint, however, is relatively invisible. The RedState Gathering in his back yard was a golden opportunity for him to raise his profile among conservatives and elbow his way into the conversation about the party’s future.

The content of his speech was effective. He cited specific local examples to hammer the government for over-regulating businesses; minutes later, he broadened and spoke in sweeping tones about the revolution against Britain, Thomas Paine’s writings, and the gift of self-governance. With eyes closed, one could easily envision this speech being delivered in Iowa or New Hampshire.

So Gardner has obvious political talent. But the delivery of his remarks on Saturday was a bit clunky — points not properly emphasized, punch lines delivered off-key. This lack of rhetorical polish would have been less memorable without several awkward exchanges during Gardner’s Q&A session.

When an attendee asked why he’d voted for Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Gardner responded that his questioner should “check the congressional record” — that he had not voted to confirm Loretta Lynch. Gardner then explained somewhat clumsily that he had, however, voted for cloture to end debate on Lynch’s nomination. “If we don’t have debate and votes . . . we will never get anything done,” he said. A man in the back heckled him: “So you voted for Loretta Lynch!”

A few minutes later, after Gardner made remarks to the effect that Colorado is not a competitive state for Trump — an assertion supported by reams of public polling — a woman shot to her feet as he noted his time was up. “I have something to say, and I’m a constituent of Colorado!” She proceeded to lecture Gardner on downplaying Trump’s chances in the state, stating — falsely — that polls similarly showed he had no chance to win his Senate race in 2014. Gardner smiled and listened politely, then quickly slipped off stage to scattered applause.

4. Carly Fiorina Is a Crowd Favorite

Save for Sasse, it was Fiorina who got the weekend’s warmest reception.

Fiorina was already a known commodity to some of these activists prior to her presidential run, thanks to chairing the American Conservative Union’s foundation board. And she appears to have strengthened her standing among conservatives after her 2016 campaign and subsequent (albeit short-lived) time as Ted Cruz’s running mate.

Fiorina’s speech had a little bit of everything. She supplied humor (and some red meat) by drawing a lengthy comparison between Hillary Clinton and Claire Underwood from House of Cards. She preached hope, reassuring attendees that America will remain the greatest nation on earth despite this November’s election. And she recycled some self-promotional lines from her campaign, reminding the RedState audience that she had risen from secretary of a small real-estate firm to become CEO of the world’s largest technology company. When she finished, she enjoyed a lengthy standing ovation.

It’s obvious Fiorina plans to stay in the political arena. Her appearance here came on the heels of a Time report last week that she is preparing to seek the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. To win that job, Fiorina will need allies in the grassroots around the country lobbying their state GOP officials on her behalf. Saturday could pay dividends in that regard.

5. Headliners Ignored the Elephant in the Room

Given the host and the ideological composition of the audience, it wouldn’t have been surprising to hear two days of dumping on Donald Trump.

Instead, the event’s premier speakers — Sasse, Gardner, and Fiorina — barely uttered his name. All three speeches offered soaring proclamations of national resilience, and tacitly argued that not even a Trump nomination (or presidency) could undo 240 years of American exceptionalism. There was not a single line, however, explicitly attacking the Republican nominee.

It was surprising, given that all three speakers have been harsh critics of Trump — and were likely invited to RedState in no small part because of it.

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Mayhem in Milwaukee

by Rich Lowry

Shameful. Some details on the officer-involved shooting prior to the rioting:

City police officials said two officers stopped two suspects in a car about 3:30 p.m. The suspects then took off on foot. During the pursuit, a six-year veteran of the department shot and killed a 23-year-old Milwaukee resident, who was carrying a semiautomatic handgun, police said.

The officer was not hurt.

During his midnight news conference, Barrett said the officer pursuing the 23-year-old man ordered him to drop his gun. The man didn’t and the officer fired several times, the mayor said.

The man was hit twice, once in the chest and once in the arm. He said police determined there were 23 rounds in the man’s gun.

Barrett said the officer was wearing a body camera and his understanding was that the camera was operational during the incident….

Police said the suspect had a “lengthy arrest record,” though the specific crimes were not detailed. The suspect was carrying a handgun taken in a March burglary in Waukesha. The owner reported that 500 rounds of ammunition also were stolen….

The shooting occurred about one block northwest of the scene of a Friday evening homicide, and about four blocks west of a Saturday morning double homicide. Five people died in shooting-related homicides during a nine-hour stretch in the city on Friday night and Saturday morning.

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If You Thought Trump’s Coverage Was Bad Before...

by Rich Lowry

By all accounts, Trump devoted much of his Connecticut rally last night to bashing the media. I’m not a Trump fan, but I do recognize a media lynch mob when I see one (no one needed fainting couches when Hillary, hyperbolically, called Trump the best recruiter for ISIS).

The problem for Trump is that he isn’t just selling the media their rope, he’s giving it away as fast as he can. He’s locked in a perverse symbiotic relationship with the press–the press self-evidently wants to destroy him and he’s glad to give it the material to work with.

I’m all in favor of deftly pushing back against the media, mocking it in clever ways, and by-passing it as much as possible, but to the extent Trump makes his campaign about complaining about the press, it will completely obscure his message and drive even more media obsession with his gaffes and how they are being covered. There is nothing that the press enjoys doing more than talking about itself and Trump has just given it license to do that even more, through, of course, the prism of its hostility to him and of his campaign’s (very real) struggles.

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Why the RNC Won’t Cut Trump Loose

by Rich Lowry

There are at least three reasons the RNC won’t cut Trump loose (at least not anytime soon):

1) The RNC is raising a lot of money with Trump now, especially via small-dollar fundraising. The fear is that if the RNC cuts Trump loose, Trump cuts it loose in turn and that the fundraising dries up and there are no resources to re-allocate to down-ballot races.

2) If the RNC gives up on Trump, it will be a blow to Trump and he will drop further. The worry is that if he begins to trail Hillary by, say, 12 points, there is going to be no saving down-ballot races regardless.

3) It’s not 1996, when the party managed to pull this off. My understanding is that Bob Dole went along with the strategy to try to save the senate in 1996, meaning he kept doing all the work to boost the party. It’s impossible to imagine Trump having this attitude. And related to point 1), in 1996, the party could easily raise soft money from corporations and spend it on advertising–that’s no longer the case.

So, for now, it’s going to be the status quo and hoping for the best.

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‘High Anxiety’

by Jay Nordlinger

That’s what Mona and I call our new episode of Need to Know. It was once a Mel Brooks flick. Now it’s Election 2016, and the American future, in the minds of some of us.

Bush 41 had another expression: “Tension City.”

Anyway, to hear our recent episode, go here. It is dominated by Trump and Hillary. But there are honorable (?) mentions for Gary Johnson, Jill Stein (!), Evan McMullin, and maybe some others.

At The New Criterion, I have some dispatches from the Salzburg Festival. Here is a new production of Faust. (There is a review, I mean.) Here is Grigory Sokolov, the bizarre, superb Russian pianist. Here is a Manon Lescaut, starring Anna Netrebko, with (new) hub.

If you want something New Yorky, here’s a post on what I regard as the coolest venue in town: the Appel Room, which is part of Jazz at Lincoln Center. No, not the Apple Room — although there are similarities (lots of glass, sleek modernity).

You know how New York is the Big Apple? I’m thinking Vienna could be known as the Big Apple Strudel.

Okay, I’m done. (Applause.)

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Krauthammer’s Take: Putin Ready to Move, ‘Sees Weakness in the White House’

by NR Staff

Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine of sending saboteurs across the Crimean border to provoke the Russians, which a Ukrainian official called “ridiculous.” Charles Krauthammer agreed, and he said that Putin is ready to take advantage of U.S. and European weakness:

It’s completely ridiculous. It’s reminiscent; Hitler started World War II by invading Poland, and his subterfuge was, his story was that the Poles had actually attacked Germany. It’s completely implausible. This is Putin who in the waning days of the Bush administration detached two provinces from Georgia. He sees weakness in the White House, a president who has — wouldn’t even give defensive weapons to Ukraine. The Europeans want to abolish sanctions. He has now made up with Turkey. He is in a very strong position. He would expect no resistance. I think he is ready to make a move.

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ALS Suicide Party

by Wesley J. Smith

The normalization of suicide by the media–in the guise of celebrating assisted suicide as autonomy–continues. Now, as I predicted, the AP touts an assisted suicide party complete with pictures of the smiling guest of honor hours before she killed herself. From the story:

In early July, Betsy Davis emailed her closest friends and relatives to invite them to a two-day party, telling them: “These circumstances are unlike any party you have attended before, requiring emotional stamina, centeredness and openness.” And just one rule: No crying in front of her.

The 41-year-old artist with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, held the gathering to say goodbye before becoming one of the first Californians to take a lethal dose of drugs under the state’s new doctor-assisted suicide law for the terminally ill. “For me and everyone who was invited, it was very challenging to consider, but there was no question that we would be there for her,” said Niels Alpert, a cinematographer from New York City. “The idea to go and spend a beautiful weekend that culminates in their suicide — that is not a normal thing, not a normal, everyday occurrence. In the background of the lovely fun, smiles and laughter that we had that weekend was the knowledge of what was coming.”

The point is to make it normal, which is why someone alerted the media.

Would Davis have hesitated–delayed or changed her mind, perhaps–if enough of her friends and loved ones had said, “No, I won’t attend a party as prelude to your suicide, but I promise I will be with you until your natural end and do everything I can to make that a worthwhile time.”?

We’ll never know. But that is on them, not her. Every one of the guests who attended that party validated Davis’s suicide and are morally complicit in it.

But Wesley, she was terminally ill! She had ALS!

My friend Robert Salamanca, who died naturally and peacefully in his sleep from the disease, would have several choice words for that argument!

Besides, so what? Suicide is suicide. Autonomy is autonomy. Why should such deaths be reserved for the terminally ill?

Answer: It won’t be. Today, the media promote suicide chirpily as a good way of ending for the dying, as they also did in the Brittany Maynard PR blitz.

Tomorrow, it will be the disabled who commit suicide cheered for “dying on their own terms.”

The day after that, perhaps, it will be a gushing story about an elderly couple who chose joint death rather than face prospective widowhood–as now occurs in Belgium.

When you think about it, there could be a whole new party industry created surrounding goodbye parties: Death cakes, “Goodbye forever” greeting cards. The possibilities are endless.

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The Right Way to Make Families Great Again

by Patrick Brennan

Response To...

Trump Engages on the Childcare ...

The most newsworthy part of Donald Trump’s economic speech earlier this week, at least in the policy world, was his proposal to help American families by making the cost of child care tax deductible up to a certain amount.

There are upsides and downsides to his proposal, as Carrie Lukas noted on the Corner, and he certainly deserves credit for taking it on. It is remarkable how vulnerable Democrats can be on such topics if Republicans are simply willing to engage and offer up their own ideas.

Provided they are well thought-through, that is, and Trump’s proposal does not seem to be: His idea is a good ways away from how conservatives should be thinking about the issue. Here’s a few reasons why, and some pointers toward how to think about the issue better:

  • The child-care deduction helps rich parents much more than poor parents. That’s just how deductions work (they are worth whatever your marginal tax rate is), and it is true even if the proposal is deductible against payroll taxes, as Carrie says the Trump campaign has suggested. This is a huge problem: The great majority of the policy’s benefits could flow to the wealthy. If you want to subsidize child care, there is no reason not to make it a tax credit, providing the same benefits to all taxpayers (and potentially even phasing it out, so it is not wasted on rich parents at all).
  • The deduction helps mothers who work but does nothing for mothers who don’t. This is a pretty straightforward problem too: If we want the tax system to support parents raising children (which we should), whether they’re working or not should be irrelevant. The right way to support them, then, is just by letting them keep more of their own money, as Carrie suggests – via an increased child tax credit. (This is a feature of the plan on which Senator Marco Rubio ran for president — disclosure: I worked for his campaign.)
  • We should think hard subsidizing something that may not be good for kids. As Carrie has written, professional daycare may actually be pretty bad for kids, relative to caring for them at home or getting help from family members. So it’s hard to see why we should be encouraging it above any other option. The only reason to do that is to push women to work more than they would otherwise, which some regard as an important economic-policy goal. But . . .
  • There are better ways to encourage women to work. The United States lags behind other wealthy countries in the rates at which both men and women work, so it’s not obvious to me why we should encourage women to work more before we do something about why men are working so much less than they used to. But if we assume we do want to do it, economists have found that second earners (typically women) respond very strongly to marginal tax rate changes, so eliminating the marriage penalty, thereby cutting taxes on second earners while marginally encouraging marriage, would be a more direct way to accomplish this. Changing regulations and labor laws to make part-time work easier would help, too.

It’s crucially important that conservatives engage on issues like the cost of raising kids, and it’s even better when they come up with specific ideas to address Americans’ concerns about them. The solutions we propose, though, should hew to conservative principles and reflect what we know about society. As it stands, Trump’s proposal just doesn’t.

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