insight into the power of the pledge created a Republican Party that is never going to raise taxes, that brand- ed itself as the party that will never raise taxes — damn that. “But they don’t want to say pub-
licly, The Republicans won’t raise your taxes, I’m trying to get them to raise your taxes. What they’ll say is, We’re all trying to be reasonable, and Grover Norquist is in the way of rea- sonable. What’s ‘reasonable’ mean? Raise your taxes! “So they say Grover’s blocking a
compromise in the Senate, instead of saying, I’m trying to raise taxes and the Republicans they wouldn’t, and they are keeping their word — damn them!”
POLITICALLY PRECOCIOUS After
the hinterland pushing your agenda. Reagan’s supporters created a
group called Americans for the Rea- gan Agenda. Already, Norquist’s reputation as a tireless enthusiast for conservative causes preceded him. He was selected in 1982 to run the new group. That was followed by a two-year
stint at the U.S. Chamber of Com- merce as its chief speech writer, and in 1985, he went to work for another outside pro-Reagan group, Citizens for America. Norquist then heard that “the guys in the White House” were putting to-
ocrat’s control of Congress. The solu- tion to that conundrum is the same one that Democrats still excoriate him for today — the pledge. But as Norquist told 60 Minutes,
the genesis of the pledge actually began much earlier, thanks to an en- counter he had with a social studies teacher when he was 12. Norquist, of course, was extremely
graduat-
ing from Harvard, Norquist loaded all his worldly posses- sions into a U-Haul truck and drove to Washington with a fellow Harvard grad named Stuart Haber. Something of a mathematical genius, Haber had received an invita- tion to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. But he was also an expert juggler, and had been recruited to become a clown in a European circus. Haber eventually decided to spurn
higher math in favor of becoming a clown. On the way to D.C., he taught Norquist how to juggle. When a visi- tor suggests a familiarity with clowns and juggling must prove useful in Washington, the glint in his eye sug- gests the line might fi nd its way into his next stand-up routine. Norquist’s arrival in Washington
could hardly have come at a better time. By 1980, the conservatives in Reagan’s kitchen Cabinet under- stood the same principle Republi- cans have recently rediscovered with the tea party movement: It’s a lot easier to get your agenda passed in Washington if you have activists in
50 NEWSMAX | FEBRUARY 2012
“They put the [Americans for Tax Reform] board together, they got the original donors together, they got it incorporated, and then they said, ‘Would you run it?’ So we had a big meeting at the White House with the board and me and [President] Reagan, and announced that we were doing it.”
gether an organization to defend the massive tax cuts Reagan made early in his presidency. The name of the new group tasked with championing low taxes and supply-side economics: Americans for Tax Reform. As Norquist recalls: “They put the
board together, they got the original donors together, they got it incorpo- rated, and then they said, ‘Would you run it?’ So we had a big meeting at the White House with the board and me and [President] Reagan, and an- nounced that we were doing it.” Norquist’s dilemma in 1986: How
to lock in the lower marginal tax rates Reagan had enacted, given the Dem-
precocious when it came to politics. He recalls spending a summer in the basement of the Weston, Mass., pub- lic library, sifting through every con- servative tome he could get his hands on. He also vividly recalls being of- fended in the fourth grade, when a teacher said he should support public radio because bluegrass music didn’t have a big enough au- dience to thrive in the free market. Then one day in
— Grover Norquist
the sixth grade, his social studies teacher made a provocative statement: Elections were meaningless, he
said, because most voters don’t even know the name of their own congress- man. Norquist decided the teacher had a point, and he dreamed up a crazy idea. What if there were a way to assure voters that when you elected a Republican, they would never raise your taxes? Just grabbing the anti- taxes constituency should be worth 45 percent of the vote, he thought. Any candidate that couldn’t fi gure out how to get an additional 6 percent didn’t deserve to be elected anyway. “You had to brand the party,”
ATR Founder NORQUIST: Obama wants to raise taxes.
SEE VIDEO AT:
newsmax.com/SeeTV
Norquist says now of his pre-pubes- cent brainstorm. “What that meant was you had to have quality control, you had to have discipline. But when I was 12, nobody was listening to my strategic advice on how to manage the modern Republican Party.” A few decades later, people started
listening. One of the fi rst things he did as the founding head of ATR was to sit down and write out the fate-
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