Saturday, Oct. 13, 2007 | 7:14 a.m.
SPARKS - The gnashing of teeth among conservatives has now begun in earnest.
At the Conservative Leadership Conference in Sparks, 500 or so conservatives from across the country and a blue-chip roster of speakers lamented the decline of the movement and the betrayal of their elected leaders, while pondering a future that seems - at the moment - dark.
Into this scene of introspection and finger-pointing Friday stepped Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He was greeted with polite applause, but it was clear he's not, at the moment anyway, the unifying Reaganesque figure he would like to be.
No, these conservatives, who tend to be libertarian-leaning, are not in a rallying mood. They want to vent and to purge.
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a hero of small-government conservatives, opened Friday's proceedings by turning the guns on his own party and many of his former Republican colleagues in Congress.
"For four or five years you had reason to be appreciative of us and hopeful of us," he said of the famous Republican class of 1994, which swept into Congress on the wave of the "Contract With America."
Then it all fell to pieces, Armey said.
"When we went away," he said, referring to himself and his political partner, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, "the spirit of the contract went away. It was not policy-oriented. It shifted to a politically oriented framework - what's in it for us to get elected; short-sighted, self-serving and delinquent."
Richard Viguerie, a longtime Republican activist who pioneered the use of direct-mail in politics and fundraising, was even more caustic. Viguerie encouraged the crowd not to support any of the four leading Republican presidential candidates, and to mount primary challenges against Republican incumbents in other races.
The Republican governing strategy, Viguerie said, could be summed up in one-word: bribery. "You have the money, we have the votes - let's deal."
Meanwhile, he said, conservatives allowed their infrastructure to crumble: "If Ronald Reagan ran today, I'm not sure we could elect him president. We don't have the organization, the framework. We need to rebuild our movement."
Joseph Bentzel, a conference attendee from California, picked up on these themes and asked Romney how he would "reform, reenergize, reinvigorate and rebrand" the Republican Party.
Romney invoked Reagan and said he was the one to bring together the old coalition: economic conservatives, social conservatives and foreign-policy conservatives.
In a later news conference, Romney was asked whether he was really the candidate to carry the Reagan mantle given that he said as recently as 1994 that he wasn't a Reagan man.
"1994 was a long time ago," he said, adding that as he gets older, he grows more enamored with Reagan. For these conservatives, for whom 1994 was a seminal and celebratory year, that's probably an astounding statement.
Chuck Muth, the Nevada conservative activist who organized the conference, said the tenor of the conversation was going exactly according to plan: "I think we're getting the frank and honest conversation we wanted."
At many conferences, he said : "They want to blow sunshine up everybody's skirt and tell you everything is OK. Well, everything isn't OK."
Conservatives abandoned the Republican Party last year, he said, because the party abandoned small-government principles.
If only Republicans would return to the true conservative principles of Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, then the party could return to its former glory, or so goes the theory of many at the conference.
It might be wishful thinking.
In a recent Wall Street Journal poll, respondents said they prefer a Democrat as the next president, 52 percent to 31 percent, the largest margin ever recorded in the poll.
Most polling indicates one of the biggest drags on the Republican Party has been the war in Iraq, a subject the speakers at the conference rarely mentioned.
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