Alan Simpson and Grover Norquist, sans talking points, at the zoo.
(2 of 5)
Simpson, as every budget watcher knows, represents the Republican half of the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles plan, which envisions a solution to the current deadlock that would involve about $1 in tax increases for every $3 in spending cuts. For moderates from both parties, much of the corporate-boardroom class and all sorts of Establishment figures in the press, this sounds like a fair solution, given the deep and lingering partisan divide among voters. Its outlines have also been the subject of recent dinners with Obama and certain Senate Republicans who are weighing the conditions under which they might abandon Norquist.
For Simpson, the correct path could not be more obvious, and the current player could not be more stubborn. "If you can't learn to compromise [on] an issue without compromising yourself, you sure as hell should never be in the legislative body. Every document of this country was a compromise," Simpson said as the two men approached a cage for the Sulawesi macaques, an endangered Indonesian monkey. "Go home and bitch and raise hell around the city council or something. Go haunt someone else. But you should never come to Congress."
Adding a tiny piece of personal advice, he said, "And you should never get married."
Norquist was not impressed by this line of reasoning, which he had heard before. "I am all in favor of compromising on the road to liberty," he told Simpson by the gorilla pen. "I say if we're here in D.C. and we're trying to go to California and we end up in Missouri, this isn't treason. Missouri is on the way to California. But if your feet are wet and everyone around you is speaking French, you're losing. That's not compromising. You're heading in the wrong direction."
They passed by an information board with handy facts about chipmunks and squirrels. "Now wait a minute," said Simpson. "Grover and I know a lot of these people right here, 'the nut seekers.' Man, I can name you some of them."
Norquist nodded and read on. "A chipmunk can put 34 beechnuts in its mouth," the activist said, clearly in awe.
A Shared History
The professional beginnings for both men in Washington roughly coincided with Ronald Reagan's 1980 election, and for a time they marched in the same direction. Simpson was a fiscal conservative and a loyal Republican but also a bit of an outlaw. His grandfather, a notable Wyoming lawyer, gambler and drinker who went by the nickname Broken Ass Bill, shot two men in his time, including his own banker for bouncing a check over a political disagreement. As a teenager in the 1940s, Simpson and his high school crew shot up or burned mailboxes, cars, a shack and just about anything else they could find around his hometown of Cody. "I was a monster," Simpson has said. As he aged, he mellowed. He put down the guns and took to shooting off his mouth instead.