CPAC, Part One
- The highlight of the day had to be seeing Michelle Malkin sitting by herself at the booth for her new blog Hot Air, looking kind of bored, while Ann Coulter’s publishers at the table across from her talked to a small crowd of people. Michelle did not look entirely pleased. Her people claim she’s still popular, but I’m still trying to figure out why anyone cared about her to begin with.
- I spotted Rob Wasinger smoking a cigar in front of the Omni Shoreham, not looking terribly stressed by the Spartanburg or CPAC straw polls.
- I eavesdropped on Carl Cameron having a conversation with someone I didn’t recognize. This marks the first time I’ve eavesdropped on Carl Cameron when he was not both smoking a cigarette and speaking on his cell phone. He was wearing the same check pattern scarf as usual.
- Jim Gilmore was walking through the crowd with an entourage of two — not a soul in the place recognized him.
- Flip, the Mitt Romney mascot (a guy in a dolphin costume), was very popular. He even tempted a couple of Romney’s volunteers to start arguing with him. Note to self: don’t argue with costumed characters in public when surrounded by people with cameras.
- A very pregnant middle-aged woman was campaigning for Condi Rice next to one of the straw poll booths. She had a page torn out of a notebook with “Write in Condi” scrawled on it, decorated with a couple of elephant stickers. She stared down a rather eccentric woman wearing a straw hat, which she had adorned with pieces of paper on which she’d written “RUDY”.
That’s about it from the first day. As usual, absolutely nothing remarkable or substantive occurred, and the conference was packed with entertaining kooks and cute conservative coeds.