It’s 10 a.m. on Wednesday and Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, and 150 of his closest center-right allies have packed the second-floor conference room at his L Street office for their weekly invitation-only, off-the-record meeting.
Norquist makes a beeline for his chair at the center of a huge table and the standing-room-only crowd abruptly shuts up and puts down its coffee and bagels.
“OK, let’s get started,” Norquist says, kicking off a whirlwind hour-and-a-half meeting in which speakers on the agenda get three minutes each. The rules are simple: Get up. Talk about what you are working on. Answer questions. Surrender the microphone and sit
down.
At this meeting, ATR shares its updated Presidential Tax Matrix, demonstrating how it has forced Republican candidates farther to the right on tax policy. The Eagle Forum plugs its new Supreme Court 101 class taught by Phyllis Schlafly’s son Andy. A White House official urges passage of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. The Heritage Foundation circulates a paper against listing the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act. The Committee for Western Civilization invites everyone to an evening of Viennese waltzing ($175 a ticket), and young conservatives and libertarians advertise a happy hour with Ralph Reed, formerly of the Christian Coalition.
An exuberant — some might say hyperactive — Norquist peppers the speakers with questions, throwing in an occasional joke or an aside, and then moving swiftly on.
“The point of the meeting is to get everybody who is center-right to tell each other what they’re doing, to share technology, share tactics, share strategy, tell stories,” Norquist explained during an interview. “You don’t get to talk about mistakes somebody else has made. … It’s a positive meeting, not a negative meeting.”
Too many people in this town think they’ve accomplished something merely by airing a complaint, he said. “Whining is not work. Work is work.”
For the past two decades, Norquist, a 51-year-old Massachusetts native who earned an MBA at Harvard, has worked as a master networker, gluing together a formidable collection of conservatives and libertarians who may disagree on some things but are united in their goal of moving America solidly to the right.
Liberals tend to despise Norquist, even as they emulate his organizational and grassroots cultivating skills; conservatives, including Bush adviser Karl Rove, a close friend for decades, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich — not to mention felon Jack Abramoff (a friend since their College Republican days) — admire him.
The “Wednesday Meeting,” which began in 1986 and has since spawned conservative strategy sessions in virtually every state and in many countries around the world, is Norquist’s signature creation, along with ATR’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge, in which mostly Republican senators, congressmen, state legislators — and even President Bush — have promised to oppose all tax increases.
“Grover is one of the most creative activists of his generation,” said Gingrich. “He’s had an enormous impact with his no tax increase pledge. He has the instincts of a Reaganite conservative — that combination of the libertarian ‘leave us alone’ mentality and a conservative philosophy.”
Norquist also has earned the respect of some traditional adversaries to the conservative movement. Billionaire philanthropist and anti-Bush activist George Soros has addressed the Wednesday meeting, as has consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Former Vice President and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore delivered his PowerPoint presentation on global warming to Norquist’s meeting long before “An Inconvenient Truth” hit the theaters.
A former lobbyist with the American Civil Liberties Union said privately that Norquist won her over when they joined forces to oppose the Bush administration’s Patriot Act and warrantless wiretapping. “I was initially skeptical,” she said, “but I knew there was common ground on this issue and that we would be most powerful if we united.”
Norquist, she said, “was always pleasant to me, always professional … and he definitely committed resources to fighting bad Patriot Act provisions.”
“He’s very idea-oriented,” Gingrich said. “It was the ferment of ideas that led to modern conservatism and he understands that to the extent it ceases to be a ferment of ideas, it ceases to be effective.”
Norquist said his strategy is to avoid unnecessary quarrels and to learn from the arguments on the left to hone his own talking points. “I want the most sophisticated right that we can have,” he said.
At his headquarters, Norquist runs on all cylinders, jovially shouting orders to his unfazed staff as he remembers things he must do. He calls for his scheduler, his spokesman, his fiddlers three, then puts the people standing in his office on hold while he turns his full attention to a call from his wife, Samah.
While discussing travel plans for April with his staff, he gives a reporter an interview and a quick tour of his office, crammed floor to ceiling with knickknacks, National Rifle Association memorabilia (he serves on the board), a poster of Janis Joplin and, on his desk, a bust of Ronald Reagan, in whose honor Norquist started the Reagan Legacy Project to get everything possible named after the president, if not his head carved into Mount Rushmore. He also has an impressive collection of at least 150 airsickness bags from planes around the world — “Here’s Air China, Air Nepal …”
He digresses, then returns midsentence to ATR’s primary goal: to maximize freedom by minimizing government.
“When taxes are down, people have more freedom to do what? I don’t know, to do whatever they want: buy a bigger house, go to dinner more often, invest in Microsoft, do whatever they want,” he said. “It’s a measure of what percentage of your life is yours, what percentage of your work product you are allowed to keep.
“If government tells you how your education is going to be run, you don’t choose. If government tells you the size of car you have or how big your toilets can be, you don’t have that freedom,” he said. “Why should government be smaller? Because people should be freer.”
But now Norquist is done talking about that and has started into his next big thing. He calls it “Google government,” a nationwide lobbying effort sparked by Texas Gov. Rick Perry and fed by Norquist and Nader, who are working to get all government spending on the Internet in a searchable format, giving citizens an easier peek into the public checkbook.
“Once we have transparency, everybody in this country, everybody in this town, everybody in this county is a deputized waste watcher,” he said.
“It’s coming,” he said. And — not unlike Norquist himself — “It’s unstoppable.”
Grover Norquist’s tips for success
1 Don’t whine.
2 Use the lever of time. People who promise to do everything by tomorrow will disappoint others. People who say “What can I do in five years or 10 years?” may not succeed, but they have a shot at it.
3 Have enough balls in the air so you’re never failing at everything and getting depressed or succeeding at everything and getting lazy.
4 Have a personal life.
5 Replace yourself. Reagan was not followed by somebody who spent his time trying to upend his successes. Clinton was.
BIO FILE | Grover Norquist
Born: Oct. 19, 1956 Hometown: Lexington and Weston, Mass.
Education: B.A. in economics and MBA, Harvard University
Family: Wife Samah Norquist; one sister, two brothers
Key jobs: Executive director, National Taxpayers Union; founder and president, Americans for Tax Reform, 1985-present
Biggest influence: Parents. “I brought them up right. They were dangerous moderate Republicans when I was young, but now they’re reasonably hardcore.”
Favorite book: “Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives” by Grover Norquist (to be released March 11); anything by Rex Stout; all of the Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser; Steven Saylor’s novels on ancient Rome
Quote to live by: “Whining is not work. Work is work.”
