Will the G.O.P. Push Grover off the Cliff?

During this year’s Republican Convention, I hopped a cab from Tampa to St. Petersburg, where my old acquaintance Grover Norquist, the Republican anti-tax activist, was giving a speech at the University of South Florida. In 2004 and 2005, I spent quite a bit of time with Norquist, working on a lengthy Profile that described him as the “ringleader, visionary, and enforcer” of the conservative coalition. After the piece was published, I didn’t see him often in person, but when I got to the St. Pete campus he didn’t appear to have changed much. He was wearing his usual blue suit. His beard was still red, if perhaps a little grayer around the edges. And he was making many of the same lame jokes, such as the one in which he says he was born in Massachusetts “before emigrating to America.”

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