Ready to rumble

Politics | Leftists packed into this year’s Take Back America conference, and they had little patience for establishment Democrats | Clint Rainey

WASHINGTON, D.C.— The Washington, D.C., Hilton hotel on Connecticut Avenue has had a rollercoaster history. In 1981, John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan just outside it. In 2004, President Bush held his inauguration ball on the concourse. And last week the Campaign for America's Future's annual Take Back America conference, now a major event on the political left, overflowed from the hotel convention facilities.

The three-day event for 2006 was enormous—and an enormous rollercoaster ride for liberals of every kind. The conference occupied the concourse and terrace levels of the ritzy hotel, filling its largest ballrooms and exhibition hall and spilling over into the outdoor gazebo. Many among the several thousand attendees seemed excited by the idea that the political defeats of past years were over: in the organizers' words, that "the conservative revolution is at a tipping point" and "losing steam."