NTU Conference

Went to this for a little while Saturday morning. All of the speakers I saw were pretty good, including my former boss Paul Jacob and Wall Street Journal political analyst John Fund. Notably Fund said that Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist will likely leave the court within the next months and that a replacement could well be named within 24 hours of that announcement. (Realclearpolitics, BTW, notes some interesting Ted Kennedy quotes on a replacement for Rehnquist)

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Fund also said that while he knows that there is a lot of concern within conservative ranks, and some gloom over the struggle to contain the growth of government, that right-wingers would be well-advised to remember that there is far more despondency on the left, where their get-togethers resemble a funeral wake.

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During Q&A following the panel discussion one conference attendee asked a question that involved some ranting and raving over government as only good as "legislation and confiscation." When he walked back to his seat I noticed that he was from El Paso County, Colorado where my parents live. Not only that but he is a member of the government himself, serving as a county commissioner.

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It brought to mind this description of Colorado Springs -- which is in El Paso County -- from Adrian Woolridge and John Micklethwait's book The Right Nation:

...Nestled under Pike's Peak, the mountain that inspired "America the Beautiful", Colorado Springs is one of America's most successful cities -- the home of "Silicon Mountain" and much of the U.S. Olympics bureaucracy. It is also one of America's most conservative cities. Almost all the local politicians are Republicans; more Libertarians than Democrats ran for the local state assembly in 2002.

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Colorado Springs has long had a military connection, and it remains a favorite place for old soldiers to retire. But in the past two decades, the town has added two rather more Evangelical strands of conservatism. First, it has spawned a tax-cutting movement, which in 1992 pushed through a Taxpayer's Bill of Rights that bans Colorado politicians from increasing any tax without first getting the electorate's permission. Second, in 1991, the town's leaders, battling with a recession that had left it the "repossession capital of America", used $5 million worth of incentives to lure Focus on the Family, a Christian Ministry founded by James Dobson, from California. There are now one hundred or so other Christian organizations in the town. As a charity, Focus, which employs 1,700 locals, is prohibited from direct involvement in party politics, but is enormously influential in Republican circles. Each week, 8 million Americans tune into broadcasts by Dobson, a former professor of child psychiatry who has also written a succession of best-selling books on Christian parenting. It is now de rigeur for Republican presidential candidates to make a pilgrimage to the Focus campus.