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.
However, these differences aren’t large, and, of course, speakers may well go over or under their allotted time. Nor is the speech on the main stage the only chance politicians necessarily have with attendees: Paul Ryan, for instance, is doing a meet-and-greet one night, while Rick Santorum is the speaker at a luncheon. And Ted Cruz gets the most time: His keynote address is given 33 minutes on the schedule A source familiar with CPAC stressed that all of the speakers were given about the same amount of time to talk, and that the minute-by-minute schedule remains a draft.