Republican Rap: can Conservative Karaoke be far behind?

When CPAC's elderly leader's decided they need to appeal to the kids, they turned to the dopiest member of the Baldwin acting family, Trinity Broadcasting Network regular Stephen:

Conservatives are still trying to figure out how to put on events that appeal to youth. But evangelical Christians have been doing it for years—Baldwin runs Breakthrough Ministries, which spreads the Word through extreme sports—and XPAC has a distinctly faith-based flavor. In fact, XPAC was probably the greatest redoubt of cultural conservatism at a conference where fiscally-focused tea partiers and Paultards ran rampant. Summit Ministries is a big sponsor, as is Focus on the Family’s program aimed at “millennials,” called RisingVoice. (“millennials” is the marketing term used by everyone trying to sell something to 20-somethings). So although XPAC avoids overt proselytizing, it skews towards the moral side of conservatism, from a screening of “True U: Does God Exist?” to Fox News host Andrea Tantaros’s impassioned plea to “save the culture” from “reality shows and money grubbers and immoral things.” 

Those most serious about politics as a profession, though, weren’t slumming it at XPAC. The College Republicans, with elephant pins on their lapels, struggle to hide their disdain for CPAC’s xtreme experiment. “I came here to see speakers,” said Chandler Harris, the College Republican national secretary. “I didn’t come here to play Wii golf.” The CRs put on intimate events in their own, small lounge upstairs, where congressmen told stories of their college days and dispensed advice for getting jobs on the Hill.

But an attendee from John C. Calhoun-land thought it was fabulous:

“It’s a brilliant concept,” says James Carroll, a freshman at the College of Charleston. “It’s not really that Democrats [put on events like] this, it’s just that Democrats, by default, have brainwashed a huge sector of the population. You hear on MTV, Vote or Die, what they really mean is vote Democrat or die.” 

Problem is, it’s much harder to make the political cool than to make what’s already cool political. As Carroll talked, the night’s “jam session” was beginning—they had moved it up from the originally scheduled time of 11:00 p.m., realizing that no one would come—but most people had already filtered out as the rapper Politik took the stage. “I see y’all leaving over there!” he shouted at back of the room. “I’ve got a message!” One mom sat bobbing her head to his tea-party-centric rhymes (“two-thousand-nine, dangerous times, socialist agenda that they want us to sign!”).