Raymond Barrett

12 February 2011
The Guardian

By Raymond Barrett

The conservative movement in the United States is at war – with itself. The battle is over government spending, and for the first time in a generation, the knives are being sharpened for that most sacred cow of the Republican party: the $700bn – and rising – defence budget.

What had been a relatively low-grade domestic dispute between the Republican party establishment and the libertarian-minded Tea Party movement boiled over into the public arena during this week’s CPAC conference in Washington – an annual gathering of conservative political groups. Supporters of the newly-elected US Senator Rand Paul – a Tea Party favourite and son of the erstwhile libertarian and prospective 2012 Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul – jeered and booed the former defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, as he was presented with a “defender of the constitution” award by former Vice-President Dick Cheney. Amid shouts of “Where’s Bin Laden?” Paul’s supporters staged a walkout during Rumsfeld’s acceptance speech for a prize that, for Republicans, is akin to the lifetime achievement award handed out each year at the Oscars.

And the reason for all this vitriol? It is not only leftwing liberals who see the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an illegal act: Rumsfeld – as a key proponent and architect of the war – is seen by some Tea Party supporters as a flagrant violator (rather than a defender) of their beloved constitution. Furthermore, the supporters of both Pauls, junior and senior, are avowedly non-interventionist in matters of foreign policy and decry the ubiquitous presence of US troops overseas, which Rumsfeld championed during his two terms as secretary of defence.

In his speech to the conference on Friday, Paul the elder was the only speaker to address the current crisis in Egypt and criticised successive US administrations for “propping up a puppet dictator”, citing 30 years of uncritical support for Hosni Mubarak. Traditionally, Ron Paul’s supporters (and the libertarian philosophy they espouse) have been dismissed as merely boisterous gadflies fluttering around the real heavyweight horsetrading for political power within the Republican party. The issues they champion range from the practical (passing a balanced budget amendment), to the fanciful (abolishing the Federal Reserve and reintroducing the gold standard); thus they have never been taken seriously by the Republican establishment.

But the rise of the Tea Party movement has changed the rules of the game, and given a more public forum to topics that were previously seen as off-limits to conservatives – such as drastically reducing the size of the US military and the propensity of successive White House administrations to deploy it overseas. While critics are quick to dismiss the Tea Party as merely the rabid right of the Republican party, many of its members reside to “the north” of the traditional “left-right” ideological divide; as such, this makes the race for the Republican party’s 2012 presidential nomination extremely difficult to predict.

The CPAC conference is traditionally the venue where prospective Republican presidents attempt to woo the party faithful, and this year saw appearances from heavyweights such as Newt Gingrich (his theme tune, “Eye of the Tiger”, greeted his appearance on stage) and a more sedate Mitt Romney, along with a somewhat bizarre cameo by Donald Trump.

These and other would-be commander-in-chiefs flexed their political muscles in front of their admirers by bashing a host of conservative bugbears including China, Europe, Iran, abortion, energy policy, Islamic fundamentalism, organic gardening and President Obama’s healthcare programme. Yet few of the Republican party’s leading lights offered serious solutions to addressing the looming $14tn national debt that is the overriding obsession of the Tea Party movement.

The Tea Party alone may not be big enough to unseat President Obama in 2012, but if its concerns are not addressed – including even the shibboleth of the defence budget – by the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls, it is certainly capable of tripping up any GOP hopefuls making a dash for the Oval Office.