At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington earlier this month, I had a brief conversation with Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, whose new book, Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future, will be published on February 28.
Grover and I talked about the political landscape of this election year — he thinks that Barack Obama has decided that, since he’s a better campaigner than president, he’ll be a campaigner rather than president — and the interplay between Congress and the White House.
At the end of the interview, I asked him why each of the several Republican presidential candidates seems to have led in the public opinion polls at one point or another since last summer, and he responded with a rather colorful analogy:
“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.”
One has to wonder what Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum think about being compared to “a roomful of pretty women.”
