Rise and fall of true believers

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More than two decades before he pleaded guilty to felonies in two jurisdictions, Jack Abramoff was the hard-nosed chairman of the College Republicans, and his lieutenants were Harvard graduate Grover Norquist, who rose to political power as president of the American Taxpayers Association, and a young Georgia student named Ralph Reed, who would later become the face of the Christian Coalition. "Today, our party readies itself to mount the wave of the future," Abramoff sermonized as a 25-year-old at the Republican National Convention in 1984, as cited in Mother Jones magazine. "Will we ride that wave to glory, or will it send us crashing ashore? If we're the party of tax cuts, and not the party of 'ifs' and 'buts,' then we're riding our wave. ... If we try to outspend big fat Tip O'Neill, or rush to Geneva to cut a deal, we'll crash ashore."
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