Feb. 21--California has stood as a bright blue bulwark against conservative political surges for years now, blocking at its border a series of national Republican sweeps and giving President Obama historically huge victories.
So it was with no little optimism that Republicans here gathered under the slogan "Bringing the Conservative wave to California." Their optimism was rewarded by a rarity -- multiple presidential prospects in California prospecting for actual votes, not money.
It was not exactly the first string, though former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina both delivered spirited denunciations of Obama, of liberals and, occasionally, of California, as they labored mightily to change that. Another prospect hoping to break out of the GOP pack, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, was scheduled to speak later Saturday.
They accused Obama of cowing in the face of international threats and gazing elsewhere as the nation's middle class suffered in the backwash of the fiscal crisis he inherited. They castigated his former secretary of State and leading Democratic presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton as planning to perpetuate his approach.
"After a decade of discontent" -- a period that notably took in the tenure of the last Republican president -- "the American people are looking for a new direction," Perry declared, as he co-opted Obama's 2008 slogan: "They want real hope, real change and real leadership."
Fiorina took aim at the dominance of California's Democrats, blaming them for the state's economic woes in particular and, in specific, the gap between its billionaires and the poverty-stricken.
"California is the test case, it is the proof positive of what happens when liberals are in charge for too long," she said.
The daylong event at the historic Fox Performing Arts Center in Riverside drew more than 850 attendees, and was formed by two components: a drive by conservative groups to coalesce their strength, and the faint hope that with a huge and fluctuating Republican field, the 2016 race could be undecided as the campaign roars into the state's late primary.
"California could become the kingmaker on the Republican side in June of 2016, and the people here are going to remember who came and asked for their vote instead of treating the state like an ATM," said John Berry, the statewide co-coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots group.
Although Berry acknowledged that the chances of California going Republican in a general election is "a long shot," he said conservative groups were working to influence elections large and small. The Unite Inland Empire coalition that sponsored the conservative gathering represented two dozen groups that previously operated separately.
The Inland Empire itself is not exactly Republican red any more; Obama won both Riverside and San Bernardino counties in 2008 and 2012. But in the political gradations of the state, inland areas still remain a deeper well of potential support for Republican candidates.
The ideology of the event's sponsors, speakers and attendees was evident -- from the multiple references to "Barack Hussein Obama" to discussions of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, and other issues that have formed the backbone of conservative criticism of the president.
But it was also a group hostile to what it saw as more establishment Republicans. A video airing on a loop throughout the day mocked both Obama and 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Several caustic references were made to a prospective candidate who as one speaker said is "very, very, very supportive of Common Core."
"It is the Obamacare of education," said speaker Ann-Marie Murrell. The elliptical mentions of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's advocacy for the education standards drew boos from the crowd.
Perry and Fiorina focused much of their attention on foreign policy and what they described as Democratic willingness to present a weakened front to the world.
"For too long this administration has led from behind, lurched from crisis to crisis guided by moral and strategic ambivalence," Perry said. "We need to summon up that spirit of old that led us to vanquish the communists and the fascists in the last century. "
"The only thing that these tyrants respect are strength and resolve," he said of leaders in Russia, Iran and elsewhere. "We need to rebuild our military, we need to reassert our moral authority at home and overseas. Now is the time for moral clarity not moral confusion."
Fiorina mocked Clinton's 2009 presentation of a faux "reset" button to Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister.
"I've sat across a table from Vladimir Putin. You don't have to spend very much time with that man to understand that his ambition will not be changed by a gimmicky red reset button," she said.
She also criticized what she said was Clinton's insufficient response to the attack on the American outpost in Benghazi in 2012, and contrasted U.S. actions against the so-called Islamic State with Jordan's King Abdullah, who when a Jordanian pilot was burned to death by terrorists "executes without delay and without apology two convicted terrorists -- and he starts bombing."
Asked in a question-and-answer session after her speech whether she was suggesting more aggressive attacks by the United States against Islamic State beyond those already occurring, Fiorina offered no specifics apart from greater rhetorical and military support for countries in the Mideast.
"There are many things that we could be doing and we're not doing any of them," she said.
Both candidates also hit Democrats hard on economic policies that they said had stifled growth. Perry declared that regulations were "how the liberal state sticks it to the middle class."
"We need to make credit more available not less so to those small businesses and we need to stop overregulation by Washington," he said.
Fiorina, who unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate from California in 2010, used the state's Central Valley as her example of Democratic excesses, insisting that "the most productive farmland in the world that has been ruined" by liberal policies set at home and in Washington.
"It is not just the agricultural land that has been ruined ... it's that lives and livelihoods have been destroyed at the altar of liberal ideology," she said.
Perry, as he does in every speech, cited his assertive efforts to control the influx of immigrants at the Texas border, a stance that is meant to cement his conservative bona fides. (When he ran for president in 2012, he suffered for Texas policies criticized by other Republicans, including support for in-state tuition for college students lacking official papers.)
Fiorina did not dwell on the subject in her speech, but in answering questions from reporters she blamed Obama for the immigration impasse in Washington. (The Senate approved an immigration measure before Republicans took over this year, but it stalled in the Republican-controlled House.)
"To solve this problem we have to get serious about security at the border," she said. "We have to get serious about fixing the legal immigration system which has been broken for decades. Of course we have to get serious about how we handle the people who are already here."
She did not, however, say how.
