A few weeks ago, in a large business hotel in Washington, a crowd of around 80 people had congregated outside one of the ballrooms when the double doors opened and a bald man in jeans and a lumberjack shirt backed out into the hallway. He was bent almost in half, wedging the doors open.
“We’re almost ready to begin!” he called out.
The crowd, who were waiting for a panel discussion on the future of the American Right, entitled Conservatism 2.0, paid only partial attention: The organizers had just started distributing sandwiches and cans of Coke, which interested them more. Then the man stood up, and brushed off his hands on his jeans. He smelled strongly of aftershave.
“Oh ... my ... God,” someone said quietly.
Slowly at first, then faster, the realization began to spread through the crowd that the bald man in the lumberjack shirt was Joe the Plumber. Within seconds he was mobbed. The panel discussion was part of the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual gathering of right-wing activists, and soon news of Joe’s arrival had filtered down the corridors to more of the 8,500 delegates. Young women bounded up with mobile phones, demanding photos. Young men in bow ties — there were a lot of young men in bow ties — thrust their hands forward. Joe posed obligingly for every photo, shook every hand.
“Oh, man, this is going to be my Facebook profile picture,” one woman said to a friend.
“You can fix my pipes anytime, Joe!” an older man yelled.
Joe smiled, pretending to find the remark ingeniously amusing. True, he may not really be called Joe, and he may not really be a plumber — due to a few questions regarding his license — and he may have come to symbolize the cheap populism and anti-intellectual rabble-rousing that helped lose Senator John McCain last year’s presidential election. But let it be stated for the record that Joe the Plumber is an incredibly patient man.
The clamor around him, though, was only one example of a strange jubilation I kept encountering at CPAC. Less than four months earlier, Barack Obama had won the election on a decidedly liberal platform; one month earlier, he’d been sworn in as president, and swiftly reversed several key Bush administration policies. Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had returned to Alaska; McCain was lying low; media commentators were declaring the death of conservatism; and years of exile for the Republicans.
Yet inside the Omni Shoreham hotel, America’s conservative activists were in a state of frenetic excitement. Perhaps it was nostalgia for the campaign just past, or the thrill of being surrounded by like-minded people, but nobody seemed remotely depressed.
Turning one corner, you’d find a group of student campaigners distributing Palin 2012 stickers and enormous full-color posters of the Alaska governor; turning another, you’d find a crowd of thousands in the main arena cheering as John Bolton, the neoconservative, predicted Obama would be a one-term president, or going wild as media personality Rush Limbaugh declared: “I want Obama to fail!”
In one room, the National Rifle Association was holding a raffle — imagine an English church fair, except with full-color posters of semi-automatic weapons — while in another the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, recently banned from the UK because of an anti-Islam film he’d made, greeted an adulatory crowd.
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