President Bush delivered a tremendous speech this morning before a very large crowd, several thousand, of highly enthusiastic activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.   The crowd wildly supported references to the war on terrorism policy. 

   The Washington Post had reported this morning excerpts of the President’s planned speech, which were distributed to some reporters last night, and included verbiage generally supportive of McCain’s quest to wrap-up the Presidential nomination very soon.  The Post had suggested in the story that Bush’s speech was an attempt to shore-up support for closing down the nomination in favor of McCain.  The real story was not exactly that.  Bush hit on the heartstrings of the crowd, discussed his accomplishments, the crowd responded extremely well, and, according to long-time CPAC staffer Tish Leonard, Bush ended his speech "stunned" at the highly supportive response he received.  The White House must be thinking now, after the speech, of missed opportunities to rally the troops in past years with the loyal conservatives here at CPAC.

   The press reports of negative audience reactions to McCain’s speech yesterday are just overblown.  For example, I could not believe the New York Times report this morning of the McCain speech and the crowd’s "negative" reaction.   That was not what I saw, and have heard from those who were present.  The back story is that there were many young Romney supporters in the audience for his emotional speech announcing suspension of his campaign, and they were still in the audience two hours later when McCain spoke.  Some of them were emotional, and unfortunately booed a couple times at McCain.  But they represented a small portion of the crowd, which received McCain very warmly.  

   I will report more on conservative leaders reactions to a McCain candidacy later today.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.