A fixture in the conservative movement for more than a quarter-century, Grover Norquist is the author of three books about politics and policy, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives (2007), Rock the House (1995); and, most recently, Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future (2012).
Earlier this month, Norquist spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner during a break at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. In part one of this interview, he discussed the political landscape of election year 2012.
Later in the conversation, Norquist pondered the question of whether Congress today is in political ascendancy vis-à-vis the president compared to previous decades.
Governing from Congress
“Yes,” he agreed to the proposition, “but I think what it comes from on the Republican side is a comfort level with governing from Congress that did not exist [previously] because the Republicans had so little experience with it. Democrats have been governing from Congress since FDR left. Democratic Congresses told Truman what to do and they basically told John F. Kennedy what to do and they certainly weren’t listening to Carter when he had ideas and they certainly told Obama what to do.”
In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton shared the agenda of the Democratic Congress but, Norquist explained, “he screwed up when they allowed him to do the thinking.” That’s when “they had problems,” he said, offering as an example “the tax increase that Clinton wanted probably would not have come out of the House and Senate the way it did and probably wouldn’t have been as damaging as it was,” if Clinton had had less influence over the outcome.
For most of the twentieth century, Norquist continued, the Democrats “had more experience governing from Congress.”
Today, he added, the Republicans – “particularly since they lived through eight years of [George W.] Bush where they listened to Bush as if he was in charge or should be in charge” -- have a changed perspective.
The attitude of Congress in 2000-06 was, Norquist illustrated, as though “he’s the duke and we’re the serfs. [In] some sense, that’s the way it was.”
The situation is different today, he pointed out.
“That’s not where people are now. It’s particularly not where [Senate GOP Leader] Mitch McConnell or [House Speaker John] Boehner,” are, he said. In contrast to past years, the attitude of the Republican congressional leadership in 2012 is like this: “I didn’t claw up my way to the top of the food chain to eat veggies. I didn’t decide to become head of the House or Senate in order to take orders from some guy who can debate well.”
GOP candidates in the lead
The reference to debating well led to another question: What did Norquist make of the fact that virtually every one of the Republican presidential candidates has led in the polls at one point or another since last summer?
“Sharing,” he quipped, “We’re into sharing.”
Then he turned more analytical.
“I think,” Norquist said, that “what it is is they’re all basically sufficiently similar. There’s no Goldwater/Rockefeller divide. There’s no Reagan/Bush divide. There’s no Taft/Eisenhower divide. Everybody’s a Reagan Republican.”
He compared the crop of potential GOP presidential nominees to “a roomful of pretty women” and asked, “Which one do you talk to first?” The answer, he said, is “I don’t know. You talk to them all.”
The problem in finding contrasts between the candidates is that, he repeated, “they’re all basically sufficiently similar.” As a result, “when they get in these arguments, they’re nitpicking” and say things that amount to “‘Ah, four years ago, you were impure!’”
The similarities, he said, are such that “it’s not you want to go here and I want to go there.” Instead, “we all want to go here but” – one candidate might say to another – “‘I want to go more than you and x number of years ago you didn’t want to go there.’”
As a consequence, "it’s a YAF [Young Americans for Freedom] fight about who is more conservative.”
There is not, he said, an authentically “serious division” and that’s why voters can “flit around between them” and putting each candidate at the top of the polls at one point or another.
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