From the New York Observer.

What was really interesting were these last paragraphs:

...The real question is whether Mrs. Clinton will be able to change that losing dynamic. Mr. Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, said that Mrs. Clinton was right—sort of—about the effectiveness of his organization. "We have a meeting with 115 people each Wednesday," he said. "It includes conservative journalists, people from government, people from the Republican Party, people from the various active parts of the coalition—and you just want to make sure that everyone knows what everyone else is doing. It’s not quite as formulaic as she would imagine. It’s ‘We’re working on this—I wanted you to know about it,’ and the writers in the room say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ and then they write about it. It’s not some set of talking points; it’s that people internalize the points."



But Mr. Norquist doubted that Mrs. Clinton—or anyone—would be able to have a comparable impact for the Democrats.

"We are complimented that she would make that observation, but reasonably confident that the left can’t do what we do, because their coalition is structured differently than ours," he said. "When I put together 115 people at our Wednesday meeting, we have the gun people and the tax people and the home-schoolers and the various communities of faith, and everyone just wants to be left alone. So we can be friends, because as long as the Christians don’t steal anyone’s guns, and the property owners don’t throw condoms at the Christians’ kids, we can all be friends. Our coalition doesn’t want anything at anyone’s expense.

"The left," Mr. Norquist continued, "is a collection of competing parasites: the labor unions, the trial lawyers, the big-city political machines, the people who are locked into welfare dependency …. They are not friends; they are competitors for divvying up the assets that the state organizes. They’ll never be able to work together as cheerfully as we do."



This may be the biggest difference between the coalition of the Left and that of the Right, and I'm not sure I've seen it described any better. "Everybody just wants to be left alone" may be the root of much of conservatism. It sure is the root of libertarianism. Heck, in earlier days some branches of liberalism were about this too, before it was eaten alive by socialism. Remember "do your own thing?"