Groovin' With Grover

Who says Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, has lost any velocity off his fastball? Not only did he, along with Peter Ferrara, provide a useful reminder of the folly of "compromising" with the Democrats on entitlements reform by agreeing to tax increases in exchange for benefit cuts - a swindle that Republicans have had pulled on them more than once over the past generation - but in an interview with the ediorial board of The American Prospect magazine, he nailed one aspect of the prospective 2008 presidential race after another.

On the Dems:

I passed out a piece on 2008 and I'll summarize it. My assumption is that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee. I believe the debates 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.

Wham, bam, thank you, uh, m'am.

And on the GOP:

On the Republican side, the guy who wins is the guy who stands in the middle of the circle I told you about ... all the moving parts of the conservative movement. There are also legacy voters, Republicans who are voting Republican because the guy at Little Roundtop was a Republican and I'm from Maine. Just as there are little old ladies in Mississippi who agree with Ronald Reagan but vote for George McGovern because Sherman was mean to Atlanta. So you have legacy voters, but over time that diminishes and you get new legacy voters. Children of people who liked Reagan are voting for Republicans.

But the moving parts of the conservative movement - guys who can and will walk in or out of the room - will become active, will become political activists and help move votes. 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.

Grover's take on "Sailor" McCain: ten paces outside the ring, and his legs are too short to get back in time. And on Mitt Romney: his feet are too close together. There's a reason why we've never had a knock-kneed president.

He'd love Jeb Bush to run (going up against Hillary would neutralize even the "dynasty" knock) even though everybody knows he won't, and names Dubya's successor as governor of Texas, Rick Perry, as the next presidential #1 draft pick after Senator Allen takes his cuts.

Either Norquist still has his stuff, or he's been syphoning my brain while I've been sleeping.