Interview with Nina Easton

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Nina Easton is the author of the seminal Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Ascendacy, which told the story of five conservatives who played a major role shaping the modern conservative movement (they were the Weekly Standard‘s Bill Kristol, former Rep. David McIntosh (R-IN), Clint Bolick, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist). We talked with her last week about two of her gang, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, and their friend Jack Abramoff, who didn’t make the cut.

TPMm: I wanted to start out talking about the work you did on the book. But most of all we at TPMmuckraker concentrate on Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. So I’d like to first ask you why you decided to pick the five you did for the book, and why Abramoff didn’t make the cut.

NE: I chose the five for very specific reasons. The first was I wanted each of them to represent a different piece of the movement, so I chose Ralph Reed, for example, to represent the religious right, Grover Norquist as a tax activist, Bill Kristol as the neoconservative Straussian. Each one of them represents a different piece of the movement, and then they also had to be institution builders.

And this is why Jack Abramoff at the time, when I started the book in ’96, he wasn’t – he was a lobbyist, he wasn’t a big movement-conservative-player at the time. So I chose movement-conservative-players who were institution builders, who looked like they would be on the scene for a long time. Like I said, he was a lobbyist.

TPMM: Do you think in retrospect he was more of an institution builder than he seemed like he was?

NE: He wasn’t an institution builder. He’s in trouble for being a lobbyist. You know, Grover Norquist built the Americans for Tax Reform, Ralph Reed built the Christian Coalition, Bill Kristol built the Weekly Standard, which has been a huge influence on the Republican party, so I don’t think in retrospect — again, he’s in trouble for his business dealings, he’s not someone who built a movement conservative institution.

TPMM: But it’s an interesting question about the Abramoff case. It’s a question of is he overemphasized — is too much being made of him because what he did makes for great news: bribing congressmen? But there are also people who think that he was more important to the Republican Party than just trying to lobby for Indian casinos. But it sounds like you don’t buy that.

NE: I think the people I chose — you could have chosen other people, but I think Ralph Reed had a huge impact on the Republican Party, he brought religious conservatives into the Party and he moved that Party to the right in a dramatic fashion. He had a real impact on the Party. Again, Jack Abramoff was doing egregious things to get rich, and I just don’t see how he’s somebody who had great influence on the thought of the Republican Party, the makeup of the Republican Party, the demographics of the Republican Party, I just don’t see that.

TPMM: I know you interviewed Reed, Norquist, and Abramoff and you know a lot about their relationship going way back. Could you characterize the relationship between those three?

NE: The three of them came together mostly as this troika that was running the College Republicans in the early ’80s. And as I say in my book, they basically turned this fairly sleepy institution into a communist cell of the right, where they would purge –launched purges of moderates in the institution, they would conduct themselves like they were at war with the left. They were at war with Ralph Nader’s PIRGs, for example, and they had a big map up on the wall with pins of where the PIRGs were on which college campuses and how they would go after them. So that was very much how the three of them came together. Abramoff was the head of the College Republicans and Grover Norquist was his Lieutenant. And then they drafted this young kid from the University of Georgia named Ralph Reed.

Let me just make an important point about when they were at the College Republicans, which is that they spent as much time fighting moderates in the Republican Party and people that they called Bushyites, those were people who were sort of loyalists to Vice President Bush, they spent as much time doing that as they did fighting the left and they were constantly at war with the Republican Party and the more moderate leaders of the Republican Party.

TPMM: You wrote a piece in The Boston Globe a couple of months ago on how Abramoff set up a couple of nonprofits, the College Republican National Fund and the USA Foundation, because he was frustrated with the budget he was on with the RNC. Could you talk about that a little bit?

NE: When he and Grover came in to run the College Republicans with very grandiose ambitions, and very costly ambitions, they were very frustrated the Republican National Committee kept them on a relatively small amount of money which they would dole out to them just like they would dole out to the Women’s Republican Clubs and so on. And so they decided to try to establish an independent financial network. And what they did, which ended up being quite destructive, and brought them into conflict constantly with the Republican Party — they first launched a very expensive direct mail campaign. Now keep in mind direct mail was the basis of a lot of new right organizations in the 70s and early 80s and it actually led to the downfall of the majority of them, it’s very expensive, and you end up putting your organization more and more in debt if you’re not successful with it. That’s what happened in their case, they kept running out of money.

The RNC officials would come in and say “Look, you haven’t paid these bills.” At one point the RNC even kicked them out of the building, because they didn’t want to be liable for the unpaid bills that the College Republicans were mounting. Then, in addition to the direct mail, they decided to set up an organization to raise funding that would be more friendly tax-wise, and they looked into nonprofits and not-for-profits.

And they ended up setting up these organizations that were not-for-profit, and as a not-for-profit you are not supposed to be engaged directly in political activities, but if you look at what they were doing in the early 80s, they were directly engaged in political activities and their rhetoric in the memos that I have show that they were and show that that was the intent of it.

TPMM: Do you think that they were trailblazing, in that respect? Because there’s often — Abramoff went on to use nonprofits, Ed Buckham went on to use nonprofits for political activities, do you think that they came up with that?

NE: I don’t know the answer to that question. But they clearly were on the forefront of it, of trying to figure out, shall we say, “creative means” of raising political money.

TPMM: You were interviewing Reed and Norquist in the late 90s, you sat down with them a number of times.

NE: I interviewed Abramoff, too, actually.

TPMM: That was pretty much the same time that a lot of the activity with Norquist, Reed, and Abramoff’s tribal clients was happening. Did that surprise you at all when that came out?

NE: Well I didn’t know about it, obviously.

I believe that all of them, and Abramoff too at the time — even though he wasn’t a central figure in the book I was familiar with his activities — I believe that there was a pushing of the boundaries, pushing of the envelope, and in a way, it did not surprise me that it came back to haunt them.

TPMM: Do you think that came from Abramoff, that pushing?

NE: There were, I think it obviously came from Abramoff to some extent, but I think Reed and Norquist did their own kind of pushing of boundaries. I don’t want to get into, right now, whether Norquist… the story has to be played out on Norquist and Reed.

TPMM: You’ve noted before that there are two sides to Reed, and it’s been reported that there’s a “good Jack” and a “bad Jack.” Does Norquist have two sides, too?

NE: I always thought that Grover Norquist had a — he really is a true ideologue, in every sense of the word. So the world has to make sense in this very, almost rigid, ideological manner. It’s less a… the foibles of Ralph Reed I document quite a bit in the book. With Norquist I just think it becomes a “whatever we do in the name of the cause, it’s legitimate” — that’s more his, I mean he is a true believer.

TPMM: How is that different from a Ralph Reed?

NE: Ralph Reed is deeply ambitious, and always was so. There was a time when he… in one of my interviews, he said he pondered running the Ross Perot campaign, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to do the Christian Right thing, he was worried that it boxed him into a corner. And he took the Christian Coalition as far mainstream as he could, and then he got out. I really think in that case it was about Ralph, and his vision for being a mover and a shaker in the Party.

TPMM: So Ralph, it was more about him, with Norquist it was more about the movement?

NE: I think so.

TPMM: Given what happened to the College Republicans back in the 80s, how they were eventually rejected by the RNC, do you think it says anything about the Republican Party, the fact that Abramoff was run out of the party in the mid-80s, but he was able to insinuate his way back into the Party with a lot of his activities? Do you think it’s fair to read into that at all?

NE: I think the danger with the liberal left is seeing the Republican Party as a monolith. Did Jack Abramoff get involved with Tom Delay and that piece of the Party? Yes. Was he close with George Bush and that part of the party? From what I can tell, no. I’m pretty confident about that.

So I think that’s the danger: to see the Party as all one big monolith. And frankly, that’s why I did the book, because my colleagues in the press at the time — this was in the ’90s — a lot of them didn’t see the conservative movement as important enough to write about, or interesting enough, and some of them frankly had bias about it. That meant there was a big, gigantic story left untold and I was able to go tell it. I think it’s always dangerous to paint a broad brush on these things. I think it’s important to go deeper and to look at the different elements of, for example, the Republican Party.

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