June 26, 2012
Presumed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney recycled establishment Bush-era foreign policy neoconservative apparatchiks June 23-24 in a weekend retreat at the Chateaux at Silver Lake in Park City, Utah, where Romney feted some 800 of his top political contributors. The gathering featured addresses by former Bush administration officials Karl Rove and Condoleezza Rice, and highlights the concerns non-interventionists have about what a Romney administration foreign policy would look like.
The Atlantic magazine summed the weekend event up this way: “The price of admission to the retreat? Only donors who gave $50,000 or raised $100,000 were welcome, and even then they had to pay their own way there. The three-day retreat featured panels and discussions designed to entertain conservative donors. [Former Bush administration Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice gave a speech about foreign policy that was apparently very critical of the President and received rave reviews. Nearly 800 people attended.”
Attending the event were Rice and James Baker III (the elder Bush's Secretary of State), both members of the establishment/interventionist New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), as well as a host of other Bush era and other establishment GOP functionaries: Karl Rove, Mary Matalin, John McCain (CFR), Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Weekly Standard publisher and Fox News commentator Bill Kristol (CFR), South Dakota Senator John Thune, U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty.
The weekend served partly as a reward for contributors, and partly as a rallying cry to continue the money train into the Romney campaign. Romney has raised significantly less money than the incumbent President Barack Obama, according to fundraising reports to the Federal Election Commission. “The president and the Democratic National Committee had about $147 million on hand on May 31, compared with $107 million for Mr. Romney and the Republican National Committee,” the Wall Street Journal reportedJune 24.
Romney, unlike Obama and his GOP rival Texas Congressman Ron Paul, has relied mostly on a few wealthy contributors who donate the maximum legal donation of $2,500. “During the primaries, his campaign has raised 60 percent of its money from people who gave the maximum legal amount of $2,500, according to the Campaign Finance Institute,” the Washington Post reported June 23.
Romney's neoconservative foreign policy advisors caught the attention of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough back in May that the advisers are “quite far to the right.”
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