REACTIONARY ROMP

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

THEY STREAMED INTO THE RESORT HOtel lobby Friday night, the best and the brightest of the new revolution, fatigued and untanned, still in suits rumpled from the Beltway fray. Here at the entrance to Miami's Doral Golf Resort and Spa was David Horowitz, leftist turned conservative author. Behind him strode movement martyr Judge Robert Bork, so foully denied a Supreme Court seat. And here was Richard Viguerie, political direct-mail pioneer and prodigal son. For the preceding few years on New Year's, Viguerie had partied with the enemy, surrounded by moderates and liberals in Hilton Head, South Carolina, at a retreat known as Renaissance Weekend. This year was different. "These are the people I've been in the trenches with for 30 years," Viguerie noted, "and for most of those years, it's been the pits." But not anymore. Viguerie surveyed the gathering throng: "It's like old home week." Welcome to the conservative answer to the Renaissance: Dark Ages Weekend.

The invitation had sported a black dragon, emblematic of "big, fat and unaccountable" government. Its recipients were invited to help slay the beast at the Doral over New Year's weekend at a cost of $550, plus greens and hotel fees. Party organizers Laura Ingraham and Jay Lefkowitz, both thirtyish Washington lawyers, promised "voodoo economics golf" played with glow-in-the-dark balls and "box aerobics" featuring punching bags done up to resemble well-known liberals. Hard liquor and cigars would be provided. And Ingraham told a reporter that the Saturday night Canterbury Tales Dinner Banquet would feature "wenches running around with sides of beef." There would be edifying seminars with guest speakers: "Executives from some of the fastest growing companies in the United States will tell us which regulations need to be gutted and why." Heeding the call, 350 worthies headed south.

They went in something of a competitive spirit. Since 1981, when a South Carolina couple named Phil and Linda Lader first hosted Renaissance Weekend at Hilton Head, the event has become the hottest New Year's ticket in America. Originally limited to 60 families, most from the South, Renaissance exploded into public consciousness when it served as a social launching pad for an ambitious Arkansas Governor named Bill Clinton. By the '90s, the intellectually stimulating but marginally too empathetic convocation of Volvo-driving superachievers was drawing six Southern Governors, a Supreme Court Justice and a waiting list of hundreds.

That was too much for Ingraham and Lefkowitz. Guests at the Doral received a pointed set of rules aimed at Renaissance's p.c. caste. No. 1 was "No group hugs." Nos. 6 and 7 encouraged the wearing of furs and the use of chlorofluorocarbon sprays. Some arrivals could not take the puckish hint that this was a time for public-policy grinds to blow off steam, but others fell right into the outlaw spirit. "I always smoked when I was pregnant," announced G. Gordon Liddy's wife to a companion. A batch of half-looped Young Turks at the bar cheered as the jukebox played the Eagles' Get Over It, a slam against self-discovery: "Bitch about the present and blame it on the past./ I'd like to find your inner child and kick its little a----." Up at Renaissance, things were running according to form. Despite temperatures in the 30s, many participants dutifully jogged the beach before their 8 a.m. seminar. Two (unacquainted) participants compared the panels to "interactive C-SPAN" and "watching MacNeil/Lehrer from 8 in the morning till 10 at night." And neither remark was meant as an insult.

But wonks are wonks, whatever their party affiliation. On Saturday morning, the Dark Ages carousers filed into Arianna Huffington's seminar on "Life After the Welfare State: What Replaces It?" When one participant declared, "Cutting government is the ultimate act of compassion," others sensitively asserted the need for "faith-based charity," at which point Ingraham was so moved she broke her own empathy ban: "It really choked me up," she said. "It's the first time I've seen conservatives really talking about that issue."

The dirty secret was that the warring weekends shared much common ground. Said Jeffrey Eisenach, the head of the Progress and Freedom Foundation and one of this season's few conservatives at the Renaissance retreat: "On both sides of the ideological split there is a sense of groping for a new vision of where the country is going."

Lovely. But when the overachievers return to Washington, a spirit more in keeping with Dark Ages rule No. 2 will once again apply: When your opponents are losing at tennis or golf, please refrain from saying "Nice try" or "Good effort." Explained Ingraham: "Winning really is everything."

--Reported by Nina Burleigh/Miami and Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by NINA BURLEIGH/MIAMI AND ANDREA SACHS/NEW YORK