Paul, Perry and Cruz touted their small-government bona fides. | AP Photos 2016 prospects hone Koch pitch

DALLAS — Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Pence, Rick Perry and Ben Carson all sounded like presidential candidates in weekend speeches to conservative activists here for a conference organized by an influential Koch-backed group.

The would-be candidates touted their small-government bona fides and hammered prospective Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama on issues ranging from the Middle East to health care to Obama’s golfing.


Cruz and Perry got among the lustiest responses from the nearly 3,000 grass-roots activists at Americans for Prosperity’s annual Defending the American Dream summit. But Paul and Pence, who on Thursday night dined privately with a more exclusive group of major donors and VIPs including AFP foundation chairman David Koch and columnist George Will, appear to have made the best impressions on the elite and moneyed class.

( Also on POLITICO: Ted Cruz downplays immigration shutdown chatter)

Now in its eighth year, the AFP summit has become an increasingly important stop for aspiring GOP presidential candidates since the Kochs’ robust political network, which spent more than $400 million in the run-up to the 2012 election, emerged as a preeminent force in conservative politics.

This year’s meeting featured a mix of hands-on training (breakout sessions on social media, phone-banking and converting liberal relatives were well-attended), fun (a mechanical bull was a big hit), private meetings and whip-up-the-base speeches from big names.

It also, however, exposed some potential fault lines, both among prospective candidates and among the Kochs’ brand of libertarian-infused conservatism, social conservatism and hawkish national security conservatism.

The billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch and their political network, including Americans for Prosperity, are animated in their political activity by free-market domestic economic policies. They are leery of military intervention, mostly agnostic on social issues and have been supportive of efforts to reform immigration laws. AFP largely shies away from those issues (though other groups in their political network have taken divergent stances), and even the more socially conservative politicians like Perry mostly avoided topics like gay marriage and abortion rights in Dallas.

( Also on POLITICO: Rick Perry serves up red meat at AFP summit)

But Perry and Cruz in their speeches focused on blasting Obama’s support for immigration reform at home and his administration’s perceived passivity abroad.

Cruz — a Texas senator who took the stage Saturday to chants of “Run, Ted, Run!” — declared of the Sunni jihadist group ISIL (also known as ISIS), “we ought to bomb them back to the Stone Age,” while Carson, a former Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon, quipped on Friday, “When we get through with ISIS, it should be IS-was.” And Perry, the governor of Texas, accused Obama of failing in his duty to protect the nation’s southern border, declaring “if Washington, D.C., will not do its job to secure that border, Texas will” — a reference to his decision to send National Guard troops to his state’s southern border with Mexico.

At one point, some in the crowd appeared to push back on Perry’s hawkish foreign policy pronouncements. Ticking off the crises in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Perry declared “the world needs a president who is not one step behind, who is lurching from crisis to crisis, who is always playing catch-up.” That prompted scattered shouts of “Rand Paul,” the Kentucky senator whose noninterventionist foreign policy stands in stark contrast to Perry’s and in some ways seems a closer fit with that of the Koch brothers.

Then there was Cruz taking a swipe at Pence, the governor of Indiana, for embracing a key part of Obama’s signature Obamacare health care overhaul — the expansion of Medicaid.

( Also on POLITICO: White House strife stalls Obama immigration plans)

“I would urge any governor not to be complicit in the disaster that is Obamacare,” Cruz told reporters when asked about Pence’s move specifically. “It is hurting the American people.”

While AFP rebuked Pence over his Medicaid expansion, it has held up as a model his successful effort to slash the state’s income tax, and sources say he impressed attendees at Thursday’s dinner.

Greg Cooper, a Plano, Texas, chemical CEO and AFP donor who sat next to Pence at the dinner, said he’d support the Indiana governor if he ran for president. “He’s done a remarkable job in Indiana,” Cooper said.

Before the dinner, Pence — who, unlike the Kochs, is a social conservative — praised David Koch and AFP for their work supporting limited-government reforms in Indiana and around the country, telling POLITICO, “I’ve met David Koch on several occasions. I’m grateful to have enjoyed his support and the support of many of the people that support Americans for Prosperity across Indiana and across this country.”

During a Friday morning presentation to activists, Pence highlighted his tax-slashing record in Indiana, and several activists urged him to seek the GOP nomination. Whoever wins in 2016, they should cede more power to the states, Pence said, explaining he’s leery of governors who promise, “Send me to Washington and I’ll run the place just like I ran my state.”

And Pence has allies within the Koch political network, which is steered partly by his congressional former chief of staff Marc Short.

Paul also has something of a foothold in Koch World — not only has he bonded with Charles Koch over their shared skepticism toward foreign intervention, but also AFP Director Frayda Levin, a major donor, has become a member of his inner circle. Introducing him before his speech, she said, “I’m a stand-for-Rand gal, not just because he’s smart, not just because he’s principled, not just because he’s good-looking, but you know what else? He’s funny.” She praised Paul for going “where few Republicans have dared to go. He goes to the inner city and he goes to minority communities, and he talks to them about the dangers of government.”

When he took the stage, Paul picked up the theme, suggesting his civil liberty-focused conservatism made him uniquely equipped to expand the GOP electorate. “If we are a party that’s going to win again, we have to be a bigger party.” Boasting, “I’ve been going where Republicans haven’t gone,” Paul said it’s important to “take the message of personal liberty and economic liberty … across the country, and we can be the dominant party again.”

That was slightly different, in tone at least, from the more strident assessment Cruz offered in his speech. “There are a lot of folks in Washington who think the way you win elections is you go to the mushy middle. You blur everything, you stand for nothing,” Cruz said. “It doesn’t work.”

Later, in a gaggle with reporters, Cruz laid out his theory of why Republicans lost the last two presidential elections. “The biggest difference is the millions of conservatives who showed up and voted in ’04, who stayed home in ’08 and ’12.” He grouped them into two categories — neither of which are heavy minority demographics: evangelical Christians and “the so-called Reagan Democrats — largely ethnic Catholics up and down the Rust Belt. They tend to be blue-collar, union members, gun owners, strong national defense.”

In fact, Cruz predicted, “2016 is going to be very much like 1980. And it took Jimmy Carter to give us Ronald Reagan. I think Barack Obama is going to produce new leadership in the Republican Party that brings us back to the principles this country was founded on.”

Paul got some of his biggest applause lines by veering away from national defense and hewing more closely to AFP’s libertarian sensibilities, lambasting the federal government’s intelligence-related data collection.

“There are things the government has to do. There are things the government needs to do. But, frankly, when you’re looking at our cellphone, listening to a download from the Internet, it’s none of the government’s damn business,” declared Paul.

But he also blasted Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state, for her role in the events surrounding the deadly 2012 attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. “If she wants to be commander in chief and she cannot protect our embassies, I don’t think that she could or should be,” Paul said. “I think it precludes her from ever being considered as commander in chief.”

All the big names had high praise for AFP, which is on pace to spend more than $125 million in 2014 and has shown an ability to boost the careers of favored politicians.

The group bridges the gaps between various strains of conservatism, asserted Pence.

“Americans for Prosperity has demonstrated that you can bring together people from all across this movement who will work in concert to advance the principles of fiscal responsibility, pro-growth policies and limited government,” Pence said in an interview.