http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=123970180GROSS: Now, you write that at the CPAC convention, there was far less attention on how the party would govern America than on the need to disavow the past popular embrace of big government. What do you mean?
Mr.?WEIGEL: Well, I mean that something that the conservative base has never been comfortable with, they've never been comfortable with the fact that George Bush was winning elections when he expanded Medicare, when he reformed the education system.
They actually think that's the reason they lost, and their narrative among conservative activists and tea party activists is that the Republican Party lost the faith of the American people when it didn't get into power and slash half of the government agencies, cut taxes even further, and abolish, you know, the estate tax and things of that nature.
GROSS: So if the conservative movement is glad that Bush isn't around anymore, and they think that he embraced big government, why was Dick Cheney such a rock star at CPAC? I mean, if anything, Cheney is the person most responsible for the expansion of the powers of the executive branch...
Mr.?WEIGEL: Well...
GROSS: And Cheney was the person who was the architect in a one of the architects of the war in Iraq, which was certainly government getting us into a very long war, a war that many people think was not only fought on false premises but many people believe has been very destructive both to America and Iraq? So why did he get such the rousing welcome that he did, if in many ways he represented the expansion of government's power?
Mr.?WEIGEL: That's an excellent point, it's just that he represents a specific kind of government expansion, the expansion of the national security state and the expansion of America's role in spreading democracy around the world with military action.
Those are very popular with conservatives, and that's a dispute. CPAC was pretty convivial this year, but the dispute that existed there was between more Ron Paul-type activists who think America should pull back from engagement in the world and wiretapping and all these debates that are hot right now, and the more-traditional conservatives, who think anything that the president needs to kill terrorists is justifiable.
So that's why he was cheered. Cheney was a surprise guest, who was introduced by his daughter, Liz Cheney, who has become a pretty successful pundit, basically making that argument, arguing sometimes against reality that everything Barack Obama does is aiding terrorists and making America less safe. That got huge cheers.
Cheney came in, made the same argument and got more huge cheers, and activists I talked to - I talked to Jimmy LaSalvia, who runs GoProud, which is a gay Republican group that's fairly new - they were distributing draft Cheney 2012 stickers, and the reason, he told me, is that Cheney put some daylight between him and Bush as a more-aggressive, more-ready-to-defend-what-conservatives-do-in-governance kind of politician.
Now, part of it was that Cheney supports repealing don't ask, don't tell, but a lot of it is that they think the only good legacies of the Bush administration were some Supreme Court appointments and his foreign policy. And again, ask a lot of Americans in 2006, 2008, that's why these guys lost
