"My assumption is that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee. I believe the debates [in the Democratic presidential primary] will be Hillary Clinton and seven guys sitting around a table, her chair will be four inches taller than everybody else's, and Biden will say things like, "I was thinking today how clever and brilliant and witty Hillary was, which reminded me that Evan Bayh is an idiot." And so, they'll kick each other under the table while praising Hillary, and then one of them gets to be vice president. So that's my operating assumption on the Democratic Party." - GROVER NORQUIST, JUNE 23, 2006
This diary is a follow-up to a shorter diary I wrote last month after having attended the American Prospect breakfast with right-wing activist Grover Norquist. More below the fold.
One of the most interesting parts of Grover's talk was how he framed the Republican/conservative coalition, using the metaphor of a lot of different people sitting around the table talking to each other. I guess it's less metaphor than reality since Grover is host to the infamous Wednesday Group (120+ right-wing big wigs) that meet weekly at his offices in downtown DC. Going along with the "everyone sitting around a table" concept:
"[O]n the vote-moving primary issue, everybody's got their foot in the center and they're not in conflict on anything. The guy who wants to spend all day counting his money, the guy who wants to spend all day fondling his weaponry, and the guy who wants to go to church all day may look at each other and say, "That's pretty weird, that's not what I would do with my spare time, but that does not threaten my ability to go to church, have my guns, have my money, have my properties, run by my business, home-school my kids." ... Pat Buchanan came into this coalition and said, "You know what? I have polled everybody in the room and 70 percent think there are too many immigrants; 70 percent are skeptics on free trade with China. I will run for President as a Republican; I will get 70 percent of the vote." He didn't ask the second question ... do you vote on that subject?
That's a damn good question, and I think our side could learn a lot from Grover's observation (which I agree with). Do judicial nominations move votes? Do people vote on health care? Do people vote on whether the US follows the Geneva Conventions? Do people vote on "the environment"? Sure, we care about these things, but are they things that make people vote for one candidate over another?
Grover continues on the Republican/conservative coalition:
:
But on the issue that moves their vote ... they want to be left alone to practice their religion and raise their kids in that faith and not have schools throwing prophylactics at the kids and stuff. That's why the right, in the conservative movement and the Republican Party, we're able to have evangelical Protestants, fundamentalists, and Pentecostals, who don't agree theologically, and conservative Catholics and orthodox Jews and Muslims and Mormons who don't agree on who's going to Heaven and why, but understand that if they're gong to be able to raise their kids and go to Heaven, the pagans over there have got to have the same political freedom to go to Hades. [...]
Everybody around the room wishes you'd spend less money. Don't raise my taxes; please spend less. Don't take my guns; please spend less. Leave my faith alone; please spend less. If you keep everybody happy on their primary issue and disappoint on a secondary issue, everybody grumbles ... no one walks out the door.
I think Grover isn't on the money here. Banning abortion? Supposedly heterosexual Christians getting all red in the face about men having sex with men? The government funding so-called religious groups through "Faith-Based Government Programs"? This doesn't fit. On the flip side, I think he's right about the secondary issue stuff, and I wonder whether Republicans have a much higher tolerance for getting screwed on "secondary issues" than Democrats.
Grover was asked directly about the gay marriage issue in the GOP, and he argued that he's not convinced gay marriage is a vote moving issue:
"[W]here's the line of leave-us-alone? Is the line of leave-us-alone, we're gays and we just want to lead our lives and that means civil unions? I thought that's where the line is ...
[...] The guys in Massachusetts jumped to gay marriage and we ended up with these 20 counter-initiatives. We don't have an obvious line in the sand that everybody could sort of live with, something where Christians could say if you mess with marriage, you're not leaving us alone, and the gays could say if you mess with civil unions, you're not leaving us alone. That I thought might have been something people could live with. But guys on both sides, some of the gays said no, unless we have marriage we're not being left alone, and some of the anti-marriage initiatives include bans on civil unions. No private contracts between you people. What? That goes beyond protecting the religious value of marriage."
Grover Norquist also confirmed that he works with both the Human Right Campaign ("on certian things") and the Log Cabin Republicans ("work with them on a whole host of issues"). Moving on ...
Here's Grover on the 2004 elections:
"Bush would have lost in 2004 if he had been running against nobody. [...] (T)here's this real tendency among candidates to go Me Me Me, They Love Me, You Should Love Me. They can love you after you get your butt elected. It doesn't have to be about you to win. Kerry made it too much about Kerry. Bush's numbers on right-track/wrong-track and do-you-think-he's-doing-a-good-job were both under 50, but he won."
I really did like Grover's take on how Bush totally screwed him his campaign to destroy Social Security:
"(T)he White House says, "Oh Grover, there are six or eight Democrats who are open to this." I said, "Name two." "Grover, six or eight." "Name two." "Six or eight Grover, really." No there aren't, there are none, OK? Because you can't get the Democrats to vote for this, you've got to get 60 Republican (Senate) votes to do it. And what Bush did was, he went out on that six-month tour, not understanding that Social Security was already dead. And it was sort of like Weekend at Bernie's. "Hey, Social Security's moving, see?" "No, you're pushing." "No, it's moving, it's alive!" And it wasn't. He didn't kill it -- when he got 55 Senators not 60, it wasn't going anywhere. And it was a very painful period, at which point he should have walked away from Bernie. Remember, they never even announced Bernie's death; they left him in a taxi or something and went away."
The entire room was laughing at the end of this part --- although Grover turned out to be right and the Bush admin. turned out to be wrong about so-called "Social Security" reform. The votes weren't there (thank God). It's all about the votes man!
Grover did chastize the anti-immigration folks in the GOP:
"(M)y concern is Tom Tancredo will become the face of the modern Republican Party. [...] If the face of the Republican Party is Reagan and Bush, we'll do fine. If the face of the Republican Party is Tom Tancredo ... last year 4.1 million people were born, 900,000 Hispanic. If you speak ill of people, they think you do not love them. And is the challenge ... how Republicans talk about the immigration issue, have a reasonable policy. I think we need more people in the country; I'd like to have more people in the country. But how do we do that in a way that keeps folks happy?
Well-taken --- but of course, going back to what he said earlier, is immigration a vote-moving issue? For Hispanics, I'd say yes, for the white folks who don't like the Hispanics, I'm not so sure.
Grover did have a strange theory that attacking big corporations is bad in the 21st century, and he logic goes as follows:
"The 1930s rhetoric was bash business -- only a handful of bankers thought that meant them. Now if you say we're going to smash the big corporations, 60-plus percent of voters say "That's my retirement you're messing with. I don't appreciate that". And the Democrats have spent 50 years explaining that Republicans will pollute the earth and kill baby seals to get market caps higher. And in 2002, voters said, "We're sorry about the seals and everything but we really got to get the stock market up."
I think Grover may be on to something here, but I've got a different take. In the 1930s, regular folks didn't own stocks. Today, tens of millions of folks own stocks. Now, the vast majority of folks have debts (credit card, mortgage, auto loan, etc.) that are FAR GREATER than some $900 socked in an E*trade account, but psychologically, I'm guessing that if you asked these folks, they'd ID themselves as "investors" far more than they'd ID themselves as "people in debt". People vote according to how the identify themselves, not their own un-acknowledged reality.
Now, were the 2002 elections about the stock market? Nope --- it was about war, terror, terrorist, terrorism, and terror on a stick. While I boldfaced the quote from Grover above, I think voters were scared of the boogie-Muslim-terrist-dude, not their paltry $900 E*trade account.
Closing up this long diary, here are Grover's takes on the 2008 GOP contenders for the presidency:
"The guy who stands most comfortably right now in the middle of that room is George Allen. Now George Allen's liability is that he looks and sounds too much like George Bush. What's the negative about him? He comes across like George Bush. But he's right in the middle and that may be good enough for him.
You've got the guy from Massachusetts, Governor Romney, who I had hoped that his campaign, whether he won or lost, would put anti-Mormon bigotry behind us in the same way the Kennedys did for opposition to Roman Catholicism. But I'm afraid that with Big Love and Anderson Cooper talking about that guy in Texas all the time -- the polygamist -- that the Mormons as quote thing instead of settling down gets pushed up. And there was some very interesting polling ... 40 years ago, would you vote for somebody who agreed with you on most things who was otherwise black, Jewish, or Mormon? Blacks and Jews -- won't vote for them, 30 percent; Mormons -- won't vote for them, 18 percent. Flash forward to today. Blacks and Jews -- 1 or 2 percent wouldn't vote for them; Mormons -- 18 percent. So bigotry against Jews and blacks went down like this and the Mormons didn't move at all. [...]
Also running, not running, may be running, is Jeb Bush. I think he'd be the strongest candidate. He's the best Republican governor in the country. He could jump dead-center on the coalition, and has a track record as governor of tremendous success. Oh, people say you can't run another Bush, people will say "dynasty." Well, when you run against Hillary Clinton, that's a harder argument for The New York Times to make. It's not impossible, but harder. And I would argue that when you talk to him, he sounds different, he acts different. [...]
The challenge for McCain is that he lost in 2000 because he was ten paces off dead-center -- campaign finance reform. He was generally a Reagan Republican except for campaign finance reform, and that was enough to up-end him because the right-to-life people were concerned, the gun people were concerned, the tax people were concerned. I ran two press conferences on campaign finance reform, one in New Hampshire and one in South Carolina, just before those primaries. He was running around telling people I spent $12 million to kneecap him in South Carolina. I held a press conference. But it had the effect of unsettling the base of the movement. People said he's not with us on this stuff. So his challenge is, having been 10 paces off, he's now switched his positions on taxes, on guns, on judges, on Kyoto, and he's got to run as the guy who flip-flopped on central issues. [...]
Watch Rick Perry, Texas ... second-best governor in the country. He cut spending $10 billion after Bush left because somebody had been spending too much money in Texas before Perry had taken over. And he could go, "Hey, I've done this before guys." Otherwise, Brownback wants to run as the social conservative as opposed to the way he views everybody else who wants to run as economic conservatives. That's the Gary Bauer strategy.
So why did I just spend my Friday evening nit-picking Grover Norquist? Well, I have a really nasty cold, but more importantly, I think it's imperative to continually keep seeking to understand everything we possibly can about the right-wing/GOP/conservative movement/whatever you want to call it.
If you don't know who you are up against, it's hard to win.