A movement is underway to stage an informal protest when former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush hits the CPAC stage Friday. 
 
 William Temple, a member of the Golden Isle Tea Party, told The Washington Times that the party doesn’t need another Bush in office, and said that the party should listen to the grass-roots activists that helped fuel their gains in the 2014 election. 
 
 “A lot of peoples were not going to come here because they heard Jeb Bush was speaking,” Mr. Temple said before laying out his plan at the Conservative Political Action Conference. 
 
 “We are going to get up en masse, and we are going to walk out on him,” the 64-year-old said. “We are not going to interrupt anyone’s speech, but we are all going to exercise our right to [use] the bathroom at the same time.” 
 
 Mr. Bush is expected to take part in a 20-minute question-and-answer session on Friday with Fox News host Sean Hannity. 
 
 He is leading in many early GOP presidential polls, but also is out of sync with many conservatives because he supports Common Core K-12 education standards and an immigration fix that includes legalizing the millions of people who are living here illegally. 
 
 PHOTOS: Hollywood's hottest gunslingers 
 
 Kristy Campbell, a Bush spokeswoman, said her boss is looking forward to being at CPAC tomorrow and engaging with the crowd during the scheduled question-and-answer session. 
 
 “It will be an opportunity to discuss his strong conservative record of leadership. We are hopeful it will resonate with attendees,” Mrs. Campbell said. 
 
 Mr. Temple, meanwhile, is a familiar face at CPAC and other conservative events. Sporting a colonial soldier private suit and carrying a yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, he said the Republican party and the mainstream media are underestimating the conservative anger over illegal immigration. 
 
 He also said he wants a presidential candidate who will reduce the national debt. 
 
 “We want new faces. We want younger faces,” Mr. Temple said. 
 
 He said the party should nominate the like of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, describing them as “true conservatives.” He called Ben Carson a “good guy.” 
 
 “We don’t want another Bush or another Clinton,” Mr. Temple said. “We don’t have royalty in this country, and as much as he is trying to say I am a different Bush, I am a different person — OK, you have had two in your family. Let someone else in there.” ||||| The fervent Republicans who throng the Conservative Political Action Conference every year aren't representative of the American electorate. They aren't even representative of the GOP electorate. For four of the last five years, their straw poll for president has chosen Rand Paul or Ron Paul. These are not everyday Republicans. 
 
 Yet the conference, which took place Thursday through Saturday, is still an important event — “the starting gun of the Republican primary campaign,” in the words of one veteran GOP strategist. It's the first real national audition for potential Republican candidates, all on the same stage, one after the other — even if the TV audience is only on C-SPAN. And a good performance can help recruit conservative foot soldiers across the country. 
 
 So almost everyone who's considering a run showed up, from CPAC favorites Rand Paul and Ted Cruz all the way to Jeb Bush, who's fighting off an unwanted label as the most moderate Republican in the race. 
 
 Here's what we learned: Bush has staying power, despite conservatives' suspicion that he's a closet moderate. Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, is hot — the new more-conservative hope to stop the Bush juggernaut. Sens. Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) could rise if Walker stumbles. Chris Christie looks like a spent force. And Rand Paul is still Rand Paul. 
 
 Yes, it's still early; none of these proto-candidates has even announced formally that he's running. But it wasn't too early for each to deploy campaign buttons and T-shirts in CPAC's big convention hall. And that means it isn't too early to describe the rough shape of the 2016 GOP field: no single front-runner, but four or five candidates who are most likely to succeed. 
 
 There are new ideas in the Republican Party, but CPAC, it seems, was neither the time nor the place. 
 
 Bush didn't have the attendees on his side. There was a smattering of catcalls when he took the stage; a flag-waving activist in a Revolutionary War uniform led a decorous walkout of about two dozen. 
 
 But Bush's organization had salted the room with supporters — a page from Practical Politics 101 — and their cheers beat back the boos. Bush sensibly tackled the two issues on which he has diverged from his party orthodoxy — immigration and education — and while he attempted to make his positions sound as conservative as possible, he didn't trim them much. 
 
 He repeated his support for legislation that would create “a path to legal status” for immigrants who are in the country illegally, although he agreed that enforcing border controls should come first. 
 
 On education, he defended the Common Core system of standards, which many conservatives loathe, insisting it was never intended to remove authority from state and local governments. 
 
 “It's fine to oppose the bad things,” Bush said. “We need to start being for things again.” It was a solid, steady performance before a tough audience, and a step Bush needed, to remind GOP voters that he's a conservative too. 
 
 But the real winner of the event may have been Walker, the usually taciturn governor of Wisconsin, who brought the audience to its feet with an animated speech full of red meat. 
 
 “There's a reason we celebrate July 4 and not April 15,” Walker said. “We celebrate our independence from government, not dependence on it.... Get government out of the way.” 
 
 He listed his actions as governor — confronting public employee unions, lowering taxes, pushing anti-abortion legislation, lowering restrictions on concealed firearms — and said they showed that he is “someone who's going to fight.” 
 
 He stumbled when, asked how he would handle Islamic terrorists, he suggested his experience as governor covered that, too. “If I could take on 100,000 protesters [in Wisconsin], I can do the same across the world,” he said — a parallel that doesn't hold up long. 
 
 But his audience hardly noticed. 
 
 “He's the one,” said Ruth Willis of Syracuse, N.Y. “He's already won more fights than any of the others.” Cruz and Rubio were more polished — but as senators, neither could match Walker's executive experience far away from Washington. 
 
 One more lesson: Republicans will be talking a lot about foreign policy in this campaign. 
 
 “Our allies no longer trust us and our enemies no longer fear us,” Rubio warned. He charged that President Obama “treats the ayatollah of Iran better than the prime minister of Israel.” 
 
 Rubio and others skipped ahead to criticize former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom they excoriated as no different from Obama in foreign affairs. “She actually gave a reset button to the Russians,” exclaimed Walker, to whoops from the audience. “A reset button!” 
 
 The growing hawkishness in conservative ranks is a bad sign for Rand Paul, who has broken with most of his colleagues to urge restraint in U.S. foreign policy. But it's in keeping with recent polls that show most voters holding more confidence in Republicans than Democrats on foreign policy — a reversal of a GOP slump after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 
 
 What was missing from CPAC? Any sign of the intellectual ferment in conservative think tanks about how to address the stagnant incomes of the American middle class. Most speakers stuck to more traditional fare: smaller government, lower taxes, less regulation. There are new ideas in the Republican Party, but this, it seems, was neither the time nor the place. 
 
 But Election Day 2016 is still a year and a half away. On the Republican side, they're off — and (almost) running. 
 
 
 
 doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com 
 
 Twitter: @DoyleMcManus 
 
 Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook ||||| Rich Lowry February 27, 2015 6:22 PM @richlowry by 
 
 They were the winners of CPAC. 
 
 Here are some impressions from the candidate speeches during the first two days of CPAC, in no particular order: 
 
 Carly Fiorina: She followed up on her strong Iowa performance with another really good, tough speech. She is an adept public speaker and is obviously auditioning for the role of anti-Hillary attack dog. 
 
 Scott Walker: It was a barnburner of a speech. He lit up the crowd and handled a heckler adroitly. His record in Wisconsin is a roll call of achievements to thrill conservatives. A few weeks ago, I thought there were three questions about Walker: Would he be up for a national race as a performer? Could he scale up his Wisconsin operation? And what are his national positions? 
 
 There shouldn’t be any more doubt on the first. But he is still especially wobbly on the last. I think he is getting unfairly dinged on comparing union protestors to terrorists — that’s clearly not what he meant — but he said what he did because he’s straining for national-security credibility. He’d be better off just having clear, sound answers to foreign-policy questions rather than reaching to extrapolate from his Wisconsin experiences. 
 
 In the meantime, based on CPAC, the Walker wave will probably only keep building. 
 
 Ted Cruz: Oddly, the quotient of applause lines to applause seemed off. His jokes were clunky and he was a little shouty. But there is no doubt that people still love him for his role in the last government shutdown. One problem for his candidacy is that his show-me-what-you’ve done riff is a better setup for Scott Walker than for himself. It is a bit odd for a senator to say “Talk is cheap” when, unless they are master legislators, pretty much all that senators do is talk. 
 
 Marco Rubio: He gave a speech that felt a little more like a set speech at a political convention than the usual CPAC red-meat fare. He kept it short to leave more time for a Q&A with Sean Hannity. The speech was devoted to American exceptionalism and American leadership and was well received. He was excellent in the discussion with Hannity. I’m glad to hear that, after the experience of comprehensive immigration reform, he now favors enforcement-first on immigration. 
 
 Rubio is a natural political talent, who has spent the last year thinking through a fresh domestic-policy agenda in support of his view of America as a land of aspiration. His personal narrative could line up very powerfully with his emphasis on American exceptionalism and his theme of the future versus the past (his one word for Hillary in the Q&A with Hannity: “yesterday”). It’s a crowded field and perhaps Rubio will never find the daylight for running room, but if he does: Watch out. 
 
 Chris Christie: Candidates had the option of giving a speech or getting interviewed. Christie chose to get interviewed by Laura Ingraham. It was a wise choice. Laura challenged him, but he weathered the questioning fine and it was a format best suited for the force of Christie’s personality. The problem for him is that his early accomplishments in New Jersey and his personality manifestly aren’t going to be enough to get him through a Republican nomination battle. 
 
 Jeb Bush: He, too, opted for a Q&A instead of a speech. Sean Hannity questioned him and hit on the big two problem issues, immigration and Common Core. Jeb handled them well, and emphasized border enforcement in his discussion of immigration. (Republicans are wrong, by the way, merely to focus on the border, when workplace enforcement is equally or more important.) 
 
 He touted his record in Florida, which was one of conservative accomplishment, and put an emphasis on economic growth. Among Bush’s strengths are his policy knowledge and his seriousness of purpose. When Hannity asked him what kind of conservative he is, he basically said a conservative practitioner—someone who doesn’t just believe and talk about this stuff but gets it done. He’s not an exciting speaker and he shares some mannerisms with his brother that might be a little off-putting to people. 
 
 But he did well before a skeptical audience, and perhaps his best line was when Hannity asked him what he thought of people reacting negatively just at the mention of his name. Bush said he would count those people as neutral and be happy to be their second choice — exactly the right answer for someone who can’t afford to give off any sense of entitlement. 
 
 Overall, it was a heartening two days. This is a very strong field, and it hasn’t even kicked into full gear yet. 
 
 — Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: [email protected].
– Today saw the conclusion of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a gathering which a GOP strategist calls "the starting gun of the Republican primary campaign," the Los Angeles Times reports. The event saw a number of possible candidates offer their pitches, and Scott Walker was among its stars: The Wisconsin governor made a "barn-burner of a speech. He lit up the crowd," writes Rich Lowry at the National Review, noting that the event settled any doubt as to whether Walker is "up for a national race." At the New Yorker, John Cassidy adds that Walker looks "like Bush’s strongest rival. Whenever someone mentioned Bush’s name, boos rang out." Indeed, Bush faced the threat of a walkout at the very conservative event, according to a report in the Washington Times. But reports say only a few people made good on that threat, and the former Florida governor came off well. "He didn’t make any enemies, or any new ones at least. Indeed, he made a pretty convincing case that he is a committed conservative," Cassidy writes. "In entering the conservative den and emerging unscathed, he did what he needed to do." Among the other candidates: Marco Rubio, Lowry writes, is "a natural political talent," and in the Times, Doyle McManus calls the Florida senator a possibility to "rise if Walker stumbles." As for Chris Christie, he "weathered" questioning by Laura Ingraham well, but "the problem for him is that his early accomplishments in New Jersey and his personality manifestly aren’t going to be enough to get him through a Republican nomination battle," Lowry writes.