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In 1998, as the Bush camp was plotting its run for the White House, Karl Rove sought out Norquist’s support. At Rove’s request, Norquist traveled to Austin for a private meeting with the then–Texas governor and presented the agenda he wanted George W. Bush to back: broad income-tax cuts, school choice, privatization of Social Security, tort reform, and free trade. Bush won Norquist over, and with Norquist’s endorsement, the Republican base soon got onboard. "The president and Rove understood the coalition and deliberately placed themselves inside it," Norquist says now. "That’s why they won and McCain lost."

With Bush in the White House and Republican leaders in charge of both houses of Congress, Norquist’s dream of a withered, tax-starved federal government should be closer than ever to coming true. But so far, the Bush presidency has brought mixed results. Rollbacks in labor laws, environmental regulations, and social programs have cheered Norquist’s corporate and conservative supporters, as have tax cuts that could top $1 trillion in the next 10 years. But at the same time, the federal deficit under Bush is set to grow to $480 billion. All told, Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress have overseen an estimated $381 billion expansion in federal spending, including the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan that have already required appropriations of more than $150 billion and are likely to cost tens of billions more before they’re through. "We have succeeded in making Republicans anti-tax, but we haven’t succeeded in making them anti-big-government," says Moore, of the Club for Growth, voicing the frustration of movement conservatives. "He [Bush] is worse than any president since Johnson on spending."

Norquist is far more circumspect, but he too has viewed the runaway budget and the Bush administration’s costly foreign policy with growing unease. "Wars are expensive and dangerous," he says. "They’re not political winners." He’s been even more outspoken about the Bush Justice Department’s all-out domestic anti-terror campaign, especially the Patriot Act, which he views as a potentially dangerous expansion of federal police power.

One Sunday last October, Norquist spent the afternoon of his 47th birthday doling out political advice to civil-liberties activists who had gathered near Washington to plot a rollback of the Patriot Act. "I don’t care if we eliminate four provisions or five provisions," said Norquist, sitting on a panel between a ponytailed activist in a Hawaiian shirt and a goateed Green Party organizer. "What we need is to draw blood."

Whatever his differences with the administration on specific policies, Norquist stops short of criticizing the president directly. "At some point," Norquist says of the massive government spending, "it becomes a deal breaker." But for now, he’s clearly decided that Bush has accomplished enough on tax cuts and other fronts that he’s willing to cut him some slack — even as he works to keep the conservative agenda on course. "My job is to make the movement and the party leader ready to lead," Norquist says. "If Bush doesn’t feel he can do something [for political reasons], it’s not Bush’s fault. It’s my job."

In building his coalition, Norquist has made a conscious strategic decision to go with a big-tent approach. At his weekly meetings, social issues like gay rights and abortion, which can divide the electoral base of conservatives and libertarians, are played down in favor of issues like tax cuts, tort reform, and the rollback of federal regulations and rules. These are the broad-appeal political winners on which Norquist is pinning the movement’s future. And they’re a strong lure for the corporate community, some of whose members — Philip Morris, Pfizer, and Time Warner, for instance — also happen to supply funding for ATR. Roughly 20 percent of the group’s $6.7 million budget last year came from corporate contributions, according to Norquist, with foundations and individual donors providing the rest. But Norquist, who says he currently makes $120,000 a year as ATR’s president, isn’t making any apologies. "We are talking about getting the business community in sync with the Leave-Us-Alone Coalition," he says.

That approach hasn’t played well with everybody in Norquist’s camp. Some of his oldest allies on the right fear that teaming up with corporate interests could lead to too many compromises of core conservative principles. In the late 1990s, Norquist signed on to a multi-million-dollar campaign for state utilities, called Citizens for State Power, that opposed federal deregulation of electric power, enraging several Republican members of Congress. "There is no ideological principle involved in these groups," Oklahoma representative Steve Largent, a member of Congress at the time, complained. (Norquist defended his actions by saying deregulation was still possible on the state level.) Recently, ATR joined with major media companies lobbying for higher caps on newspaper and television ownership, even as the National Rifle Association and other conservative groups warned that the proposed changes would give media conglomerates too much power. "Rightie Grover Norquist is too close to Rupert Murdoch," kvetched William Safire, the conservative New York Times columnist. Despite his commitment to free trade, Norquist has also lobbied against imports of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada, a matter of critical importance to the pharmaceutical industry, which is a major donor to the GOP. Norquist’s take on the issue, in fact, is the same as that of the drug companies, which claim that allowing reimports would hurt their ability to bankroll research on the next generation of drugs. "There was some division [within the movement] at one point," he says, dismissively. "But I don’t think there is anymore."

Norquist has had far less trouble uniting conservatives and corporations around his master plan for taking down the Democratic Party. By design, each of the prongs in that strategy is a win-win. Tort reform, for example, attracts millions in campaign lucre from corporate leaders while undermining trial lawyers, a major Democratic support base. School choice divides largely Democratic inner-city communities desperate for better education and undermines the authority of teachers’ unions. Social Security privatization could one day provide a windfall to Wall Street brokers, who increasingly favor Republicans with campaign donations, while eliminating one of the most successful Democratic government programs in history. Tax cuts for rich investors give a Republican voting bloc even more money to send to campaigns. There is nothing accidental about this. "You want to make your team bigger and their team shorter," Norquist explains. "And the trial lawyers fund their team, labor unions fund their team, city tax collectors fund their team."

Closer to home, Norquist has been working to purge the corporate-lobbying community of Democratic supporters, a plan he calls the K Street Project. He has circulated a list of Democratic lobbyists, while getting out the word that lobby shops that employ them can expect less cooperation from the GOP-controlled Congress. Vic Fazio, a former Democratic member of Congress who now lobbies at Clark and Weinstock, says some of K Street’s corporate clients have tried to resist these pressures with only mixed success. "They feel at times that they have to go along," says Fazio, whose clients include AT&T, Microsoft, and the pharmaceutical industry, noting that some Democrats "feel this makes them unmarketable."

It’s not the first time Democrats have complained that Norquist doesn’t fight fair. Though both parties regularly push the limits on campaign-finance rules, Democratic leaders claim that Norquist’s group has gone over the edge. For the 1996 election, the Republican National Committee gave ATR $4.6 million for direct-mail and attack ads. Democratic Senate investigators later claimed that the shuffling of money appeared to violate ATR’s tax-exempt status. More recently, Oregon Department of Justice investigators found ATR had served as a conduit in what authorities said was a "laundering scheme," through which Norquist collected money from Oregon business leaders and trade groups that was then rerouted into the coffers of Oregon Taxpayers United, an anti-tax organization working to limit state spending. Though the group was found guilty of violating Oregon election laws, Oregon officials never pursued a case against Norquist. "It was both legal and proper," he says.

For the 2004 election, Norquist says he hopes to become a funnel for rich Bush supporters, who, because of campaign-finance reform, can no longer write unlimited checks to the GOP. "I am aggressively letting people who might want to be involved in soft-money contributions know what we do," he says.

HOURS AFTER ONE of his Wednesday meetings, Norquist appears at a Washington think-tank forum with former Clinton adviser Matthew Miller. The subject is Miller’s new book, The 2 Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love. Miller argues that by adopting some conservative free-market approaches, all Americans could be provided with universal health care, stabilized Social Security, a livable minimum wage, and quality public education in inner cities. The cost: an increase in government spending by only two percent of the gross domestic product, which would still leave the government smaller than it was under Ronald Reagan. But Norquist is having none of it. "This offer of a trade reminds me of a deal the Soviet Union was offering as it left Eastern Europe," he says dismissively, when given the chance to comment. "And every time we didn’t give them an answer they kept asking for less."

Visibly rattled by the blunt force of Norquist’s rejection, Miller tries to engage him in an argument. "I understand that rhetoric as a matter of politics. I don’t understand it as a matter of intellectually engaging with the ideas I am trying to put out," he says. "I know from the National Journal that you are the most powerful man in Washington, so I have to take these arguments very seriously. But intellectually, aren’t you the product of suburban public schools?"

It’s an invitation to a policy debate, but Norquist isn’t interested. By the age of 12, he already knew that government was bad, that the Soviet Union must be eliminated, that public monopolies were worse than the private sector, that social freedom was more important than social fairness. He isn’t about to change his mind now. "We are deadly serious," he declares. "We do intend to have a smaller and less intrusive government, and every time the government gets smaller there are fewer Democratic precinct workers in the world." It is, he says, a virtuous cycle. "We can create our own majorities. We’ve been doing that for the last 20 years. And I’m cheerful because my team is winning."

For the moment, nothing could be clearer.

Michael Scherer is Washington correspondent of Mother Jones magazine, where this article originally appeared, ©2004, Foundation for National Progress.