GROVER NORQUIST... The Tea Party’s Man in Washington declared on 60 Minutes to Steve Kroft that he is leader of the movement, “to restore America’s tax structure to the 1900 level.”  Kroft seemed incredulous and asked if he heard right. Do you mean 2000.  No, Norquist said he meant 1900. He said government must be reduced to the size of a bathtub and then halved again.  I don’t even know what the bathtub analogy has to do with anything or how it could possibly have meaning.  Can it be possible that Norquist and the Republicans who say they won’t break their “pledge” to the lobbyist would be willing to take America back to a time when the country had all kinds of problems, many of them having to do with a large percentage of Americans living hand-to-mouth on hardscrabble farms and in struggling cities.  

Norquist says “individual initiative and not government is the correct solution to America’s economic and social problems today.  He was born in Pennsylvania but grew up in Weston, Massachusetts, where his father was vice president of Polaroid Corporation in a time long before the that company fell on hard times in the digital age (in 2008 the company filed for bankruptcy protection).  Norquist’s silver-spoon-in-the-mouth growing up experience was managed without his ever having to apply much individual initiative to advance economically, educationally, or socially.  He was heir to the good life, which he has enjoyed consistently since he was a child.  His laments that people who must rely on food stamps to eat and on government help to get medical care and on government programs to get education simply lack individual initiative. The guy obviously doesn't know much about where and how poor people live in America... or he is deliberately disingenuous.  Many of those drinking the tea party koolaid are uneducated and basically ignorant of American history and of political science and of elementary sociology, but Norquist is well educated and not ignorant of the dynamics of politics and sociology.  

If I were a gambler, I’d bet his effectiveness as a leader of the Republican won’t extend far beyond the beginning of the new year. I'm also guessing he will take several congressional leaders in his party down with him.  To survive, the party has to begin to appeal to young, educated, twenty-first century citizens who aren’t going to be willing to start over again with a 1900s America.