Campaign '04: The Right's New Wing

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Coyle also suggested strategies for handling "the left's dirty tricks." "The left loves to take over Q and A and ask endless questions," he said. "You have to have your people in line to ask questions." Coyle offered a couple of cons of his own: "You can bar signs at the door on grounds that they can be used as weapons. It's kind of silly, but it works." He also recommended writing letters to local papers--"but don't have all the letters come from the College Republicans. You don't want it to look like they're all from one group."

Coyle then introduced Steve Hinkle, 24, a conservative activist from California Polytechnic State University, who gave this advice: "If people are protesting and angry and tearing down your flyers, it can be really intimidating, but it means you are doing your job. And no matter what, don't ever apologize--for the speaker's message, for the way you've advertised it, for the controversy ... The left wants you to apologize, and if you do, you are ruined."

Despite their victim routine, conservatives are making quick advances on even the most liberal campuses--and YAF's millions are no small reason. Take Ithaca College. When foundation officials described it to me, it sounded like a suffocating gulag. I was told that a Bay Buchanan speech had been reported to the college's Orwellian-sounding bias-related-incidents committee and that professors in the politics department openly sniggered at Republican kids in class.

You don't have to spend much time at the college to see that liberals run the place. It posted a website after 9/11 devoted almost exclusively to critiques of the U.S. The site includes the text of a talk by Professor Asma Barlas, who chaired the politics department last year, in which she blames "Jewish groups" for "introducing modern forms of terrorism into the Middle East" and suggests that capitalism "provided the breeding grounds for much of modern day extremism."

When I spoke with her in March, Barlas told me it was her department's role to challenge students with perspectives they won't get elsewhere. "If they are coming from a group who has a President in power, can they really claim to be oppressed and marginalized?" she asked. "Our strength is our ability to offer our students alternative perspectives." Alternative in this case means liberal: with help from the local Republican Party, some conservative students surveyed the college's professors and found 113 Democrats and seven Republicans, none of whom taught politics. When I asked Assistant Professor Charles Venator Santiago, who teaches an introductory politics course called Ideas and Ideologies, whether he assigned conservative thinkers, he responded, completely without irony, "I am teaching Hitler."

But outside the radical pocket of that department, the Ithaca College Republicans--with YAF help--have begun to change the campus in the four years since Roger Custer founded the G.O.P. organization. "They are the most visible group on campus now," says Braeden Sullivan, a former co-president of one of the college's gay groups, BIGAYLA. "They don't have the biggest group of people"--in fact, only about 15 students regularly go to Ithaca College Republican meetings--"but they are definitely the most visible group, and that's a big change from a couple years ago."