Washington

Man oh man does this gun nut know how to play a crowd! Wayne LaPierre may have the moniker of a sitcom sommelier but he's got the lungs of a longshoreman. He's head of the National Rifle Association, and right now he's at the podium of the ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel, leading the members of the Conservative Political Action Conference in a chanting denunciation of the panty-waist politicians and girly-boy journalists who have no respect for the right to bear arms. It's a multimedia presentation. Every now and then M. LaPierre breaks from his speech, and the vast screens hung from the ceiling on either side of him brighten with video clips. He shows a tape of Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's congressional delegate, telling a bunch of hecklers to "Pipe down!" at a gun control meeting.

When the tape ends LaPierre rises to his tiptoes.

"Pipe down?" he shouts. "Pipe down? Who does she think she is?"

The ballroom rocks with good-natured catcalls.

"Delegate Norton," says LaPierre, throttle out, "when we're talking about our constitutional freedoms, we will NOT be told to PIPE DOWN!"

I swear you could see the ceiling of the ballroom rise. M. LaPierre pushes it further still.

"We are Americans," he goes on, over the war whoops. "We are free!" More whoops! "And WE WILL NOT--PIPE--DOWN!"

And they don't--the CPAC activists pipe up, and up, and up. It's a glorious performance, a perfect fit between rouser and rabble. CPAC conventions distill the conservative movement, the ideological base of the American right wing, to its most concentrated form. The conventiongoers eagerly grab up the Ann Coulter duffels and the Hillary Barf Bags, festoon their shirtfronts with Bill "Pinocchio" Clinton buttons (him--still!), and when a red-meat slinger like LaPierre shows video of a mincing PETA activist--"I wish this guy would spend as much time doing his homework as he did doing his hair!"--he is guaranteed to receive a rollicking reception indeed. CPAC is what Democrats think the Republican party looks like.

LaPierre continues, and the temperature rises. Next he lights into Mayor Michael Bloomberg, "the mayor with big money in New York City--who'd rather attack your rights than throw the book at criminals. And not just in New York--he wants to impose New York City-style gun laws on you!" Sssssssssss--a young couple behind me press a rattlesnake hiss through clenched teeth. Then LaPierre takes off on all those candy-butt pols who supported the Clinton "Gun Ban of 1994," and the antihunting bluenoses, and the liberal media . . . until, after a ferocious tribute to the Founding Fathers, he leaves the stage to make way for the next speaker, who is none other than the former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani.

The juxtaposition of speakers is a sly joke on the part of the CPAC organizers, a bid to make the mayor feel just the tiniest bit unwelcome. LaPierre is a CPAC kind of guy, Giuliani not so much. Though he's supposedly unpopular with the party's right wing, the mayor's been invited because of his unavoidable place in the larger Republican party today. For Giuliani is two things at once: an apostate and a frontrunner--a Republican presidential candidate who leads all others in the polls despite holding several views that, judged by the standards of Republican orthodoxy, teeter at the edge of heresy.

Take Wayne LaPierre's issue of guns, for example. Giuliani has not only supported the anti-gun position of his successor Bloomberg, he was also a vocal proponent of that Clinton Gun Ban of 1994. When President Clinton encountered stiff resistance to the bill, Giuliani urged him to "go on the offensive," extend the ban, and "seek uniform laws on gun control throughout the country." As mayor he joined a lawsuit against firearm manufacturers to recoup damages from criminals who used guns. He endorsed a federal licensing procedure that would be imposed on all 50 states, through which the feds would require that gun owners "demonstrate good moral character and a reason to have the gun," as Giuliani said in 2000, on Meet the Press. It's a good thing for Giuliani that Wayne LaPierre didn't bring that video clip along. I bet Wayne's got it back at the office somewhere, though.