Last Friday evening I had the pleasure of attending my first-ever Lincoln-Reagan Dinner, the Fort Bend GOP's annual fancy shindig and fund-raiser. A few short years ago this event became famous as the subject of an intra-FBGOP legal and political struggle, but happily this year the night had the opposite effect.

The banquet had an enormous turn-out, giving those campaigning for office a chance to mingle with hundreds of grass-root activists and local conservative voters. There were even a significant number of candidates from neighboring counties in attendance, such as rising young talent from Harris County like Mike Wolfe and Chris Daniel.

The attendance and cross-county interest contributed to an overall atmosphere of excitement and optimism, an attitude that was only compounded once everyone got to hear Laura Ingraham's speech.

I was prepared for a largely boring presentation featuring generalities and base-pleasing platitudes. In my experience, speeches by pundits tend to be long on predictability and short on concrete points and substantial entertainment.

Fortunately, Laura's speech proved to defy the stereotypes. Besides being thoroughly funny, it was based almost entirely on specific details and policies from what we saw and heard in the political world of 2009. She focused on two themes in particular.

Firstly, those in attendance were given a long and very pointed list of all the broken campaign promises and failed legislative initiatives surrounding President Obama after just one year in office. The result is not only a firestorm of expanded political capital, credibility, and popularity in the polls, but also the development of a love-hate relationship with his own far-left base.

Secondly, she went into depth about the failure of mainstream media to accurately predict the political future and its insatiable need to generate (and rely on) transient narratives. In the first half of last year, virtually every newspaper, magazine, and television show was flooded with the narrative that the GOP was a dying party and that conservative principles were permanently finished in mainstream America ("We Are All Socialists Now", "The Republican Death Spiral", etc.) This fed into further (and widely accepted) notions that were taken from granted in the media, such as the inevitability regarding the passage of a Democratic health care bill circa December 2009.

Now, of course, polls show that Republicans are widely more enthusiastic about the upcoming elections and that the fiscally-conservative Tea Party movement polls as the most popular political "party" in America. On top of that, the very left-wing health care "reform" bill (stuffed to the brink with special exceptions and favors for Democratic legislators, unions, and trial lawyers)is currently floating face-down along the Potomac.

Overall, the Lincoln-Reagan Dinner was extremely well organized and run. I would like to especially thank the officers and leadership of the Fort Bend GOP and Daniel Wong for providing a table for the Young Republicans. The year is certainly off to an energizing and successful start for conservatives in Fort Bend County!

As always, for more in-depth commentary and thoughts from me about this event, please visit my own political blog at www.redhottexans.com