McCain's Deal with the Devil- Palin tapped by Powerful Group You've Never Heard Of
source: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/352178/print
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The members of the Council for National Policy are the hidden hand behind McCain's Palin pick. CNP members have included Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Grover Norquist, Tim LaHaye and Paul Weyrich, and vetted George Bush in 2000. They met recently in Minneapolis, and were electrified by Sarah Palin's acceptance speech.
Meet the Most Powerful Conservative Group You've Never Heard Of
By Marc J. Ambinder
When Steve Baldwin, the executive director of an organization with the stale-as-old-bread name of the Council for National Policy, boasts that "we control everything in the world," he is only half-kidding.
Half-kidding, because the council doesn't really control the world. The staff of about eight, working in a modern office building in Fairfax, Va., isn't even enough for a real full-court basketball game.
But also half-serious because the council has deservedly attained the reputation for conceiving and promoting the ideas of many who in fact do want to control everything in the world.
For many liberals, the 22-year-old council is very dangerous and dangerously secretive, and has fueled conspiratorial antipathy. The group wants to be the conservative version of the Council on Foreign Relations, but to some, CNP members among the brightest lights of the hard right are up to no good.
Baldwin said he doesn't get many calls from the press. But he's happy to answer some basic questions.
Of the group's reputation, he said, "There's a lot of stuff out there claiming we're a lot more than we are."
What they are or rather, what sway they hold is a source of some dispute.
In 1999, candidate George W. Bush spoke before a closed-press CNP session in San Antonio. His speech, contemporaneously described as a typical mid-campaign ministration to conservatives, was recorded on audio tape.
(Depending on whose account you believe, Bush promised to appoint only anti-abortion-rights judges to the Supreme Court, or he stuck to his campaign "strict constructionist" phrase. Or he took a tough stance against gays and lesbians, or maybe he didn't).
The media and center-left activist groups urged the group and Bush's presidential campaign to release the tape of his remarks. The CNP, citing its bylaws that restrict access to speeches, declined. So did the Bush campaign, citing the CNP.
Shortly thereafter, magisterial conservatives pronounced the allegedly moderate younger Bush fit for the mantle of Republican leadership.
The two events might not be connected. But since none of the participants would say what Bush said, the CNP's kingmaking role mushroomed in the mind's eye, at least to the Democratic National Committee, which urged release of the tapes.
Partly because so little was known about CNP, the hubbub died down.
The CNP Against Liberalism
The CNP describes itself as a counterweight against liberal domination of the American agenda.
That countering is heavy and silent, in part because few people, outside its members, seem to know what the group is, what it does, how it raises money, and how interlocked it has become in the matrix of conservative activism.
Conservative, it clearly is.
Unlike other groups that meet in darkened chambers, the CNP doesn't seem to favor, as a matter of policy and choice of guests, one-worlders, secular humanists, or multicultural multilateralists.
According to one of its most prominent members (who asked that his name not be used), the CNP is simply and nothing but a self-selected, conservative counterweight to the influential center-left establishment.
Still, the group's shadowy reputation deters some high-profile figures from speaking before it those who directly influence policy.
Meet the Most Powerful Conservative Group You've Never Heard Of
By Marc J. Ambinder
When Steve Baldwin, the executive director of an organization with the stale-as-old-bread name of the Council for National Policy, boasts that "we control everything in the world," he is only half-kidding.
Half-kidding, because the council doesn't really control the world. The staff of about eight, working in a modern office building in Fairfax, Va., isn't even enough for a real full-court basketball game.
But also half-serious because the council has deservedly attained the reputation for conceiving and promoting the ideas of many who in fact do want to control everything in the world.
For many liberals, the 22-year-old council is very dangerous and dangerously secretive, and has fueled conspiratorial antipathy. The group wants to be the conservative version of the Council on Foreign Relations, but to some, CNP members among the brightest lights of the hard right are up to no good.
Baldwin said he doesn't get many calls from the press. But he's happy to answer some basic questions.
Of the group's reputation, he said, "There's a lot of stuff out there claiming we're a lot more than we are."
What they are or rather, what sway they hold is a source of some dispute.
In 1999, candidate George W. Bush spoke before a closed-press CNP session in San Antonio. His speech, contemporaneously described as a typical mid-campaign ministration to conservatives, was recorded on audio tape.
(Depending on whose account you believe, Bush promised to appoint only anti-abortion-rights judges to the Supreme Court, or he stuck to his campaign "strict constructionist" phrase. Or he took a tough stance against gays and lesbians, or maybe he didn't).
The media and center-left activist groups urged the group and Bush's presidential campaign to release the tape of his remarks. The CNP, citing its bylaws that restrict access to speeches, declined. So did the Bush campaign, citing the CNP.
Shortly thereafter, magisterial conservatives pronounced the allegedly moderate younger Bush fit for the mantle of Republican leadership.
The two events might not be connected. But since none of the participants would say what Bush said, the CNP's kingmaking role mushroomed in the mind's eye, at least to the Democratic National Committee, which urged release of the tapes.
Partly because so little was known about CNP, the hubbub died down.
The CNP Against Liberalism
The CNP describes itself as a counterweight against liberal domination of the American agenda.
That countering is heavy and silent, in part because few people, outside its members, seem to know what the group is, what it does, how it raises money, and how interlocked it has become in the matrix of conservative activism.
Conservative, it clearly is.
Unlike other groups that meet in darkened chambers, the CNP doesn't seem to favor, as a matter of policy and choice of guests, one-worlders, secular humanists, or multicultural multilateralists.
According to one of its most prominent members (who asked that his name not be used), the CNP is simply and nothing but a self-selected, conservative counterweight to the influential center-left establishment.
Still, the group's shadowy reputation deters some high-profile figures from speaking before it those who directly influence policy.
