Andrew Breitbart holds court with admiring conservative bloggers.

We were promised Xbox and cigars.

Neither turn up, but that’s probably for the best, since the Microsoft Innovation and Policy Center on Massachusetts Avenue NW is swarmed by hundreds of right-wing bloggers in town for the Conservative Political Action Conference. Yes, hundreds of tech-savvy, red-‘til-they’re-dead activists-turned-journalists are here, and it’s time to party.

The scene is Blog Bash and, like other CPAC parties a few miles away at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, it’s a mutual-admiration society lubricated by free-flowing booze. (If you’re not going to play video games, at least there’s always drinking.) It’s also a little more diverse. The notion of CPAC looking like a country-club soiree rings true; the blogging community includes more women and more people of color than one expects.

But at this point, it’s difficult to separate the conservative blogosphere from the rest of the movement. At the main shindig, bloggers, those crumpled denizens of what many of us consider the backwaters of the Internet, are a big deal. While traditional credentialed media are put in a ground-floor filing room filled with televisions with live-video feeds of the speeches, the bloggers get balcony seats over the stage in the main ballroom. Extra-special bloggers even get a private lounge furnished by the conservative hub TownHall.com. (My own pass is at the normal blogging level.) CPAC will even have its own blogging awards ceremony this weekend.

So why the offsite fête? “Bloggers didn’t have the money to go to those black-tie dinners,” says Melissa Clouthier, who runs a site from her home in Houston and started organizing BlogBash five years ago. “The least I could do was figure out to give them a free meal.”

And, perhaps true to the heartland values being espoused all weekend, that free meal is very rich and traditional—braised pulled pork, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, biscuits and gravy—good thing no one is complaining about not being accommodated in their veganism.

Still, what is it about this group that makes it feel like an emerging power base? For one, there’s a feeder system. No one gets to be the belle of the right-wing ball from his or her laptop without putting in the hours. Most of the people here are dutiful, but spare-time writers who still have day jobs. If they’re lucky, one of the big sites—Breitbart, HotAir.com, Pajamas Media, The Daily Caller—will pick them up. And more and more, elected officials feel the need to kiss the ring. A few aspirant House candidates are here, so is Rep. Connie Mack IV (R-Fla.), who is running for the U.S. Senate this year. There’s even a rumor Rick Santorum might show up.

Peter Boddie is at the bottom of the food chain. A burly 57-year-old from Littleton, Colo., Boddie tells me he had his political awakening not long after the 2009 economic stimulus act.

“I’m a Tea Party guy,” he says. Boddie, who works was a hydrological engineering consultant, isn’t prolific by any measure, but he’s working at it. His posts are mostly attempts at Onion-like satire—his debut, about Ward Churchill, an anti-war professor at the University of Colorado, is a little stale even for when it was written. Recently, Boddie’s turned toward a more personal narrative. A post about Santorum winning the Colorado Republican caucus isn’t great stuff by any measure, but at least it’s earnest. As for being at CPAC?

“I’m just in heaven.”

Perhaps more illustrative of the conservative blogging network is Anita MonCrief. Until 2008, she worked in the D.C. office ACORN, the now-defunct community organization whose political arm helped Barack Obama’s presidential campaign with voter turnout in some states’ primaries. Feeling she had witnessed election fraud, MonCrief started talking to reporters from The New York Times, but the story was buried.

“I turned to the only thing I had—myself,” she says. Herself, and the conservative blogosphere, which, eager for any dirt on the then-new president, gladly brought her into the fold. Now a reliable conservative herself, MonCrief is one of the stars of BlogBash. People approach her in admiration all evening. “People say the right is racist,” says MonCrief, who is black. “But people welcomed me with open arms. Bloggers did.”

And then, in walks Andrew Breitbart, the closest thing this scene has to a self-made media baron. He’s like the Richard Branson of this scene, willing to invest—if not money, then certainly attention—in everyone’s alternative, right-of-center narratives. To be featured on one of his “Big” sites is to have made it to the top of the chain, and Breitbart speaks as though he’s grown an army.

“There’s stuff being done on my behalf that would shock you,” he tells me as we walk toward the bar. He’s stopped every seven or eight steps though, usually to congratulate an up-and-comer on a piece of muckraking that is embarrassing to either the Obama administration or the political left. A young man named John Sexton, whose blog “Verum Serum” has been especially critical of the Occupy Wall Street movement, is one of Breitbart’s favorites. He’ll later be crowned “Blogger of the Year.”

“When you wear ‘right-wing’ on your sleeve, it’s kind of fun,” Breitbart says, angling for a glass of red wine. “We’re the counterrevolutionaries of a failed media order.” The bar is three deep at this point. Breitbart, who is tall, taps the shoulder of someone closer to the front and asks him to put in the drink order. The wine arrives a few seconds later.

But for all his apparent supremacy atop this heap, Breitbart still professes an outsider’s voice, despite being a regular guest on cable talk shows and owning one of the most widely read partisan news and commentary sites.

“We’re just mischievous, impish and puckish,” he tells the crowd later on. But, yeah, Breitbart knows he’s there to—if he’ll permit me to borrow a stump line of one of his enemies—fire them up and get them ready to go.

“I think this election will be won because of the power in this room,” Breitbart says to a chorus of cheers after winning an award titled “Changing the Narrative” for the moment last year when he commandeered a press conference that was supposed to be held by then-Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) in the wake of the congressman sending some rather embarrassing photos over Twitter to a young woman. Breitbart’s site reveled in publicizing the images, which eventually prompted Weiner’s resignation. Breitbart isn’t done milking the story yet. He grabs a BlogBash beer coozie and slips it over the trapezoidal award. Everyone gets it.

John Sexton, center, BlogBash’s “Blogger of the Year.”

If there’s an ick factor at BlogBash and in the right-wing blogosphere, its name is Larry Sinclair. If the name rings at all familiar, it’s because he’s the guy who in 2008 posted a video on YouTube claiming that in 1999 he had sex with and smoked crack cocaine with an Illinois state senator named Barack Obama. No one’s ever really believed him, including, I’m sure, the people in this room who live to discredit the Obama administration.

He wants to talk to everyone, but only the daring want to talk to him. Breitbart gives him a warm hello; Sinclair asks me to snap a photo of the two and I oblige. It’s one of those client-and-patron kind of moments. Sinclair, the lone wolf crying foul, and Breitbart at least being willing to listen. I’m not really sure he believes Sinclair either.

“Andrew’s never attacked me,” Sinclair tells me. “He’s kept an open mind. He says I’m either the most psychotic son of a bitch he’s ever met or I’m 100 percent telling the truth.”

A band plays. They’re called Madison Rising—you know, for James Madison because of the Constitution and all—and they’re not very good. But for BlogBash, they’re perfect with songs about American exceptionalism, the Reagan administration and how horrible the mainstream media are. After they play tune or two, the singer, Dave Bray, tells me I look like someone he knows from back home in central Pennsylvania. I tell him he’s got the wrong guy.

“You got a secret brother out there, man,” Bray says. I ask him to sign a copy of Madison Rising’s album. Maybe if they hit it big on the right-wing conference circuit, I can hock it for something decent on conservative eBay.

As the party starts to wind down, I spot James O’Keefe, the prankster-activist whose viral videos brought down Acorn and a pair of NPR executives, holding court with some of his fellows in skullduggery. He, too, will win an award for his latest stunt, one in which he used the names of dead people to obtain ballots in last month’s New Hampshire presidential primary. His acceptance speech is succinct:

“Fuck the media!” I wince, just a bit.

As the party winds down, I run into Boddie again. He’s had a blast meeting these people he’s grown to admire, many of whom are half his age. I relay to him something I heard Breitbart say about how to be a successful political blogger:

“You have to be a warrior. You can’t be a pussy.”

Does Boddie feel that he’s doing that in his spare-time blogging?

“I’m trying to save my country,” he says. Last summer, at a Colorado Rockies game in Denver, Boddie crossed paths with David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign guru, of all people. He felt this was his chance to speak his mind about the federal budget to someone with real sway over the process.

“I debated Axelrod in a hot dog line and I kicked his ass,” Boddie says. And when Boddie and his wife got back to their seats behind home plate, Axelrod was two rows ahead of them.

The party’s really wound down about 10 p.m. Santorum never showed up, nor did those cigars that the organizing committee had tweeted about earlier in the week. Most of the visiting bloggers are retreating back toward their hotels, some are headed to some more CPAC afterparties. Not Clouthier, though. She’s exhausted. But, kicking off her two-inch heels, she’s also exhilarated after bringing together this cadre of 21st-century pundits.

Getting a bunch of bloggers together might be like “herding cats,” she says. But it’s worth it. “I love the people in this room.”