It’s time to recap all of the Western CPAC fun from this weekend and I’ve decided to do it in three posts called “The Good”, “The Bad”and “The Douchey”. Yes, the last one will be about the episode on the New Media panel.

But let us begin on a positive note and recount all that went well.

There was a lot going on for Californians at the conference. Gubernatorial candidates Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman both spoke, as did Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Chuck DeVore, who is running against Barbara Boxer for Senate. All but Whitman gave some private time to the bloggers so we could ask questions (we were told that it wasn’t Whitman’s fault that we didn’t get a VIP room interview). It’s always a plus to have access to candidates and politicians rather than just having to blog about the stump speeches.

All of them were gracious and interesting but I was really impressed with Poizner. I didn’t know much about him prior to this weekend and found his focus on the California voters who don’t declare a party affiliation to be one of the first decent ideas I’ve heard from anyone in the California GOP in a long time. The Republican party here is a dysfunctional mess and is in dire need of a strong, clear-headed leader.

Poizner has a young, new media savvy communications and press team. Honestly, any candidate running for a national or gubernatorial office who doesn’t have a new media specialist on board is hard for me to take seriously these days.

Another highlight of the weekend was the Blogger Row assembled by Elizabeth Crum. Jim Hoft has pics of and links to all of us at Gateway Pundit. It was a pretty heavyweight group of bloggers for a regional conference (I don’t throw myself in that category, I was there for the Twitter reach, of course).

It was all I could do to keep up with tweeting the conference but my good friend Melissa Clouthier managed to tweet like crazy and post a lot. We will not be testing for performance enhancing drugs, however.

The conference kicked off with speeches from Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Ralph Reed. Both speeches were better than I thought they would be. Pawlenty’s stump speech is already rather polished and we’re still three years away from the election he has his eye on. That’s a sad sign of the never ending story that is a modern presidential campaign cycle.

Reed really brought his A-game Friday night. I’ve never been compelled to pay much attention to him on television but I thought every word of his speech was fantastic. Melissa has more details here.

Wrapping up the positive (because I bring cheer and joy), there were a lot of cool people in attendance. I got to meet a lot of Twitter friends in “3-D” for the first time, which is always a bit surreal.