At the National Review Institute, The Crowd Is White, Except The Hotel Staff—And The Speakers
01/26/2013
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF

I'm "behind enemy lines" at the National Review Institute.

I must say we enjoyed a wonderful spread last night. Good food, amazing desserts, open bar. Frank Sinatra’s New York New York is playing and we're being served free wine and champagne. You can't make it up. People are getting lunch now. I looked carefully—not ONE white hotel worker and the language of choice is Spanish. In contrast, I'd say the crowd is about 85% white, with people over 30 being about 99% white (except for speakers).

Krauthammer made sure to tell of us that he doesn't believe in the demographic theories. Of course, he did believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so that doesn't give me too much faith. He's still operating under the assumption that Hispanics are this magical natural Republican constituency.

Our program on what is wrong with the Right featured—Reihan Salam, Ross Douthat, Bill Kristol, Yuval Levin, John Podhoretz, and Joe Scarborough. Much of the talk focused on how they could not pronounce each other's names.

Salam tried to steer it right off the bat towards a defense of Bush (making a nod about how Bush wanted to handle immigration) but it quickly was diverted into stuff about taxes and such. There's a lot of talk about the GOP being defined as the party of "growth" as opposed to austerity, but no one seems to know what that means.

Print Friendly and PDF