By Scott D. Johnston
For GH Newspaper Group
The eighth annual Roanoke Conference brings hundreds of Washington state Republican Party activists and enthusiasts and some nationally known conservative voices to the Ocean Shores Convention Center this weekend.
“We’re expecting a great turnout,” conference president Josh Dill said. The conference has drawn about 600 each of the last three years and Dill said, “This may be our biggest yet.”
The Saturday night keynote speaker is Jonah Goldberg, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. Goldberg’s political commentary is widely syndicated and he is the author of the 2008 New York Times No. 1 bestseller, “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.”
The featured speaker Friday night will be Rachel Campos-Duffy, a Fox News contributor, author and media personality who first gained fame in 1994 as a cast member on the MTV reality television series, “The Real World: San Francisco.”
Participating in various panel discussions, roundtables, breakout sessions and debates are an assortment of state GOP notables including Mark Schoesler, State Senate Majority Leader, J. T. Wilcox, House Republican Floor Leader, several more state senators and representatives, losing gubernatorial candidate Bill Bryant, and Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman.
Other participants offer examples of the mix of ideas and interests found at the event. They range from the Association of Washington Business and the Washington Policy Center, to Olympia Master Builders, the Washington Potato Commission and the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based, nonprofit think tank best known for its advocacy of intelligent design.
Dill described the event as “a big-tent conference” that attracts “a lot of different people” and isn’t limited to pure politics, but includes “some issues that aren’t necessarily partisan.” Topics include “Solving Homelessness: Challenges Facing Police, Lawmakers and Social Organizations Who Are Trying to Help,” “From Farm to Table, Port to Market…,” “…Why and How the Whole Ballot Counts,” “Should Washington State End Its Use of the Death Penalty?” and “…Why Religious Freedom is Important and How It Can Be Defended in Washington State.”
Standard registration for the event is $135. For active military, the fee is $100. Students can attend for $50 and the conference offers free admission for some students who register in advance as volunteers to assist at the event. Online registration and more information are available at the website, www.roanokeconference.org.
From about 265 in attendance at the Roanoke Conference’s inaugural event in 2010, the gathering has grown to over 600 and become a “must attend” event for state GOP leaders. Bearing no relation to Roanoke, VA, the name “Roanoke Conference” comes from the Roanoke Inn on Mercer Island, where the idea of the conference was first conceived over a few beers. The concept of the event, according to their website, was to “create a retreat-like atmosphere in which the up and coming generation of people passionate and interested in public policy and politics could form bonds that might knit together frayed coalitions in a swing ‘blue’ state.”
This will be the first year the Roanoke Conference has been held while a Republican holds the White House. New President Donald Trump was merely a footnote in the straw poll of presidential candidates conducted at last year’s conference, finishing well behind Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Rand Paul.
Trump’s ascendancy will likely be among the subjects addressed by keynote speaker Goldberg Saturday night, as he has been very critical of Trump, during and after the presidential campaign.
Dill expects that Roanoke attendees will enjoy Goldberg, who he described as “sort of a Manhattan Republican, in some ways similar to West Coast Republicans.”
Of the 45th President’s Inaugural Address, Goldberg found several positives, but also wrote, in a National Review column over the weekend: “This simply was not a conservative speech and it was barely a Republican one — at least going by how those terms were conventionally defined up until, say, 2014. … Man oh man did he promise a lot. When you run as a man of action and promise a revolution, you’re expected to deliver it. Overpromising and under-delivering — by Obama, Democrats, Republicans, tea partiers, the conservative establishment, and counter-establishment – is largely why Trump won the primaries and the election. If it spelled their undoing, it can spell his too.”
