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An Interview with Grover Norquist

By BILL STEIGERWALD

Grover Norquist is one of the most influential conservative operatives and sharpest political strategists in Washington. As president of Americans for Tax Reform, the taxpayer advocacy group he founded in 1985, each week he chairs the "Wednesday Meeting," a gathering of more

Bill Steigerwald

than 120 elected officials, political activists and movement leaders. It's just one of many reasons The Wall Street Journal has called him "the Grand Central Station" of the conservative movement. Norquist's new book, "Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives" (William Morrow), examines what he says are two competing "teams" in American politics -- the "Leave Us Alone Coalition" and the "Takings Coalition" -- and explains the demographic, economic and political trends that are shaping their futures. I talked to him April 22 on his cell phone as he raced around to various meetings in Washington.

Q: The Leave Us Alone Coalition is who?

A: Taxpayers who want their money left alone. Property owners who want their property left alone. Gun owners who want their Second Amendment rights left alone. Home-schoolers who want their kids left alone -- and everyone for whom the most important thing in their life is their faith and their family and who don't want the government attacking their faith or throwing prophylactics at their kids.

Q: And the Takings Coalition people would be?

A: Trial lawyers, labor unions, big-city political machines, government workers, people with government contracts.

Q: Who is your book written for?

A: Anyone who is interested in the politics of the United States for the next 25 years.

Q: Why did you write it?

A: Well, since I do political work and have been doing political work for the last 25 years, I've learned how the center-right coalition works and how the left coalition works. And the mistakes that each team makes come from misunderstanding the nature of their own coalition. It's the equivalent of a book that tells you how a car works, so that people who are interested in riding in cars can get somewhere. It's about how political coalitions work. And how smart politicians damage themselves when they misunderstand what moves voters. Since I'm center-right, I'm hoping that the center-right will learn more from it than the left, but a smart person of the left could learn quite a bit too.

Q: You point out many demographic trends or changes that mostly bode well for the Leave Us Alone Coalition.

A: There's probably 40 different shifts. The growth in the number of the investor class. ... The decline in organized labor from 30 percent of the private sector work force in 1970 to 7 percent of the private sector work force today. … There are some groups that tend to be Republican -- Orthodox Jews are growing. Mormons are having more kids. ... These are exactly the sort of things over time that cause problems for the left: the growth of home-schoolers, people who absolutely want to educate their own kids and want to be left alone to do so.

The challenge for the right is the growth in the number of Hispanics. They have to decide whether they are capable of carrying out a conversation about immigration that doesn't come across as mean-spirited and not do with the Hispanic vote what they did in the 1960s with the African-American vote, which is to kick it away for at least a generation. That's the question mark, because Bush was doing very well and then in 2006 the Republican Party went the other way on immigration -- on the tone, sound and the way they were heard on immigration. It's not so much the policy as your tone. The tone of the conversation determines whether Hispanics think you want them to be Republicans or you don't want them to be Republicans.

Q: Is there any single trend or shift that gives you hope that the Leave Us Alone Coalition is in the ascendancy?

A: The growth in the number of people with shares of stock -- because those people, when they hear people wanting to tax businesses, understand that they're taxing their retirement. If you own shares of stock, it makes you more Republican and less Democrat, and it makes you more independent.

Q: There's a lot of talk about how good the Obama and Clinton campaigns have been about finding new ways to raise money from the bottoms-up by using the Internet. Does that mean the Takings Coalition is getting stronger or smarter?

A: People tend (echo sounds in a hallway; voices in background) to react to fear very strongly. If trends continue, organized labor is a spent force in politics in the next 10 years. If trends continue, and judges keep moving to the right, the trial lawyers will not be able to win billion-dollar decisions. Therefore in this election, as in 2004 and for some time in the future, the Takings Coalition sees their livelihood at stake. That's why you are seeing a lot more money out in support of Obama and Clinton than for the Republican, because the Republicans haven't figured out that they are threatened with tax increases. But even a Republican threatened with a tax increase, or a Leave Us Aloner threatened with a tax increase, is not as active a participant as a government contractor, trial lawyer or government worker who thinks he or she wont have a job unless the Democrats win. So what you are seeing, I hope, is the last ditch defense of the Takings Coalition. But a cornered rat defending a lot of stolen gold will fight very, very hard.

Q: Is John McCain part of the Leave Us Alone Coalition, or does he understand it?

A: I think there was a time when he and Bush were fighting that this was not true. But since then he has now come out to continue the 2002-2003 tax cuts. He's advocated abolishing the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax), dramatically cutting the death tax to 15 percent and cutting the corporate income tax. He's called for fighting against spending. He wants a war against the appropriators. I think that's extremely important. And frankly, in some ways, he's a better Leave Us Alone candidate than Bush, who was good on taxes but didn't focus on the necessary fight against spending.

Q: Are you more or less optimistic about the direction we are going politically after seven years of President Bush? There's been a lot of spending and a lot of un-conservative behavior going on.

A: The Bush years had a great number of missed opportunities. That is certainly true. I remain optimistic that the center-right will win, because my optimism is not based on the theory that we win all battles and are always smarter than the other team, but rather that we are competing in the United States, the country that wants to be a center-right Leave Us Alone Coalition country - which would not be the case if we were looking at France or Bulgaria. I would not bet on the center-right Leave Us Alone Coalition in France or Bulgaria. I do tend to think that in the United States that's the more likely team to win. But both teams get times at bat. Both teams get to be smart and stupid. And certainly in the last seven years we have missed opportunities to move the ball forward more rapidly.

Q: What is the most important information in your book that you would want everyone to know?

A: I think it's the nature of the Leave Us Alone Coalition and the modern center-right or Reagan Republican coalition -- the understanding that everybody's there because on the issue that moves their vote, what they want from the government is to be left alone.