It’s worth pointing out that at the time of the Pledge’s creation Reagan himself had already violated it by clawing back about half his 1981 tax cut. Four years after the Pledge was born George H.W. Bush raised taxes, including tax rates, and two years after that Bush lost to Bill Clinton, who raised taxes once again, leaving ATR’s founding mission in tatters (and putting the federal budget on the path to solvency by decade’s end).

Poppy Bush’s 1992 defeat enabled Norquist to spin the straw of ATR’s failure into gold. Bush’s loss was commonly thought to have resulted from his violation, not of Norquist’s Pledge (which Bush never signed) but of Bush’s own ill-considered “read my lips: no new taxes” pledge in his 1988 convention speech. Evidence for this hypothesis has always been weak; among other difficulties, four months after his Great Tax Betrayal (i.e., at the start of the Gulf War) Bush saw his approval ratings soar to 89 percent. Bush lost mainly because of the slow recovery from a recession that the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official referee of the business cycle, didn’t declare over—hard cheese for Poppy—until December 1992. (Ross Perot did Bush a fair amount of damage as well.) No matter. Republicans took away from the 1992 election the simplistic lesson that they must never, ever, raise taxes—something they hadn’t been particularly inclined to do, of course, in the first place. This absolutist new orthodoxy allowed Norquist to position himself as the high priest of the antitax movement. But it was the orthodoxy born of the 1992 election, not the priest, that made all the difference. Norquist reportedly advised George W. Bush (who did sign the Pledge) on his tax cuts in the aughts. But Dubya wasn’t in thrall to Norquist so much as to Sophocles and Freud. Whatever “41” caught hell for doing in office (raise taxes, leave Saddam Hussein in power) “43,” playing Oedipus, did the precise opposite.

To update Josef Stalin’s famous rhetorical question, how many divisions does Americans For Tax Reform have? Not a lot. Although it threatens mailings to terrorize violators of the tax pledge, it has never been a heavy hitter financially. It spent about $1.6 million this year on lobbying, which sounds like a lot but doesn’t even put it in the top 20. (Exxon Mobile, which ranks 20th, spent $9.9 million.) It spent about $16 million in independent expenditures in the 2012 cycle, mostly to oppose Democrats, two-thirds of whom won anyway. Sixteen million isn’t bad—that ranks ATR 17th in independent expenditures—but the real financial powerhouses were Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers, whose Crossroads GPS and Center For Patients Rights (an anti-Obamacare outfit) bankrolled fully half of ATR’s spending. ATR targeted one Republican, Eric Hovde, R.-Wisc., because Hovde wouldn’t sign the pledge, and Hovde did indeed lose. But it’s doubtful that the $3,547 ATR lavished on his primary defeat had much to do with it.

Norquist is mainly a media creation. To TV bookers, he’s a dream talking head: Funny, blunt, smart, cynical, and never reluctant to play the role of ideological extremist. (I’ve always thought it was Norquist’s media irresistibility that kept him from paying a higher price for his extremely close ties to disgraced superlobbyist Jack Abramoff.) During the 1990s Norquist helped run the “K Street Project,” a Republican-led protection racket to prevent lobbying firms from hiring Democratic ex-staffers, but in the end that effort achieved little more than bad publicity. Norquist presides over “the Wednesday meeting,” a weekly gathering of conservatives modeled on a similar weekly meeting presided over by Paul Weyrich, an influential Republican activist who ended up being regarded even by fellow conservatives as a crank. What little influence Norquist ever had has diminished in recent years. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, and House Speaker John Boehner have both openly dissed Norquist, and in 2012, for the first time in recent memory, we had a presidential election in which Republicans were actually downplaying the tax-cut issue.