THE RINGLEADER.(Grover G. Norquist)(Biography)

For much of the twentieth century, Washington was a Democratic town. Presidents came and went, but on Capitol Hill, which is where the tax dollars get spent, liberals and moderates dominated the key committees and set the legislative agenda. Washington's permanent establishment--the law firms, the lobbyists, the research institutes, the media--was also heavily Democratic. Even when Republicans took over, they tended to be consensus builders, like Howard Baker and Bob Dole, who rarely challenged the ruling ethos. Especially after Senator Barry Goldwater, of Arizona, made his disastrous bid for the Presidency, in 1964, conservative Republicans were regarded as oddballs. In 1974, when the American Conservative Union organized its first annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or cpac, it was able to muster just three co-sponsors: an organization called Young Americans for Freedom and the magazines National Review and Human Events. "The movement was so small that I liken it to when Marx and Lenin were in exile," David Keene, the president of the American Conservative Union, said to me recently.

Gradually, the political climate changed. An important moment came in 1979, when Ronald Reagan embraced the religious right, something that Goldwater had always declined to do--social conservatives like Jerry Falwell deserved "a swift kick in the ass," he once commented. Since then, conservatives have taken control of much of the federal government, and they have also created their own research institutes, lobbying firms, networking organizations, and media outlets. This year's cpac, at which Vice-President Dick Cheney was one of the speakers, had more than ninety co-sponsors.

Grover G. Norquist, a former young Reaganite whom Newt Gingrich, the House Speaker from 1995 to 1998, described to me as "the single most effective conservative activist in the country," has helped bring about this transformation. For all its success, the right is an often fractious alliance of evangelical Christians, laissez-faire liberals, neoconservatives, corporate conservatives, and many other sects and sub-sects. Norquist plays a key role in keeping the coalition together, acting, by turns, as ringleader, visionary, and enforcer. "It's very unusual to have a leader in the conservative movement who can unite everybody," Charles Black, a veteran Republican strategist, says. "Grover's got a way of convincing people that they are important and that what they are doing is significant." Norquist has some critics on the right--the pundit Tucker Carlson once called him "a mean-spirited, humorless, dishonest little creep"--but his ability to marshal disparate groups has earned him access to the highest levels of power. "There's nobody like Grover," Ralph Z. Hallow, a political reporter for the Washington Times, says. "He's close to the White House. That means Karl"--the Presidential adviser Karl Rove. "He's well liked on the Hill. And he's also trusted by the movement."

Norquist has never held an elected office, but, since taking over the advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform, in 1985, he has persuaded countless Republican politicians into signing a pledge not to raise taxes under any circumstances, among them two hundred and twenty-two congressmen and forty-six senators. Norquist's advocacy extends to other conservative goals, such as free trade and reform of the labor laws. Last summer, when I met with him for the first time, he said that his ultimate aim is to halve the size of the government relative to the size of the economy and to undo several decades of liberal policy, and, he added, "it's doable."

Norquist, at forty-eight, is squat, bearded, and bespectacled. He has pale-blue eyes and reddish-brown hair that lies flat on his square head. Contrary to Carlson's opinion, he does possess a sense of humor, but it doesn't detract from his monomaniacal passion for politics. As we talked in his cluttered office, near the corner of Twentieth and L Streets, in downtown Washington, he paced back and forth, opening and closing his briefcase, rearranging books on his shelves, moving pens and papers around on his desk, and, finally, bending down to pick up bits of dust. As long as George W. Bush was in the White House and the Republicans controlled Congress, he assured me, every year would bring a new tax cut and further conservative legislation. "That is how the Democrats built the New Deal and the Great Society," Norquist said. "Every year more spending, every year more programs."

Last November, when President Bush was reelected and the Republicans regained control of the Senate, Norquist's prediction of an emerging conservative hegemony seemed accurate. There appeared to be little to prevent the President from transforming Social Security, opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, and making permanent the tax cuts he introduced in his first term. In recent months, however, something surprising has happened: the forgotten center of American politics has reasserted itself. Dozens of Republican congressmen have defied the President to support the expansion of embryonic-stem-cell research; seven Republican senators have joined with seven Democrats to preserve the judicial filibuster; the President's proposals for Social Security have faltered as the Democrats have seized on the issue; and the White House and social conservatives squabbled, to begin with, anyway, over who should replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court.

Norquist, too, has suffered some reverses. On Capitol Hill, his economic agenda has been stalled, and in many parts of the country Republican governors and legislators have ignored his dictates and raised taxes. What's more, he has been dragged into the corruption scandal surrounding Tom DeLay, the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, and Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Republican lobbyist who paid the airfare for DeLay's now notorious golfing trip to Scotland in September, 2000. Norquist is an old friend and political ally of Abramoff's, and they have worked together on a number of political issues. Democrats have seized on their connection to try and discredit Norquist. "Ten years ago, Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff set out to change the Republican Party," Karen Finney, the communications director of the Democratic National Committee, said to me last week. "Their dealings in this town are representative of a culture of corruption and abuse of power."

On Wednesday mornings, Norquist hosts an off-the-record gathering of conservative activists that has evolved into a wide-ranging forum for members of Congress, Capitol Hill staffers, single-issue campaigners, journalists, policy wonks, and corporate lobbyists. Karl Rove shows up every few months, and other Administration officials attend on a regular basis. The "Wednesday meeting," as it is known, has become so popular that Norquist's friend John Fund, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal, has christened him the Grand Central Station of conservatism.

The meeting starts at ten o'clock sharp and finishes sometime between eleven-thirty and twelve, depending on the agenda. Norquist sits at a big oval wooden table with about twenty regulars. The rest of the crowd gathers along the sides of the room, where there is seating for about a hundred. Often, people have to stand. One day this spring, Norquist opened the meeting by talking about his ongoing fight to persuade Mitch Daniels, a former White House budget director who is now the governor of Indiana, not to raise taxes. "Our dear friend Mitch Daniels had his brain temporarily kidnapped by North Koreans, but we are now winning the battle," Norquist said. "Fortunately, Mitch has reversed his policy, adopted our position, and proclaimed it as his own."

Norquist loves to declaim. He refers to Democrats as "the enemy"; he has described bipartisanship as "date rape"; and he likes to talk about reducing the federal government so much that he could "drown it in the bathtub." For policymakers like Rove, he provides an invaluable link to the Republican Party's conservative base, which is often suspicious of elected politicians and officeholders. For the activists who constitute that base, Norquist combines access to power with the aura of an outsider. "Grover came to Washington believing in and working for certain things, and, in spite of lures and blandishments from all sorts of people, he has stuck with what he believes," Peggy Noonan, a former White House speechwriter, who has known Norquist for more than twenty years, wrote to me in a recent e-mail. "Others came to D.C. and became co-opted, subtly and comfortably, by the big murky muddle, which can offer so much: insiderism, big Administration jobs, celebration as a moderate by the MSM"--mainstream media. "None of that seemed to tempt Grover."

The first guest speaker was Tim Goeglein, a thin, bow-tied White House official, who talked about the ongoing standoff on Capitol Hill, where Senate Democrats were blocking the approval of some Republican nominees, including half a dozen conservative judges and John Bolton, the ambassador-designate to the United Nations. Outraged Republicans were threatening to exercise the so-called "nuclear option" of abolishing the filibuster, which allows a minority of senators to defy the majority. During last year's election, the Bush Administration intimated that it intended to remake the Supreme Court in…