Grover Norquist Photo: CNN

Americans for Tax Reform Chief Grover Norquist predicts Republicans will win the game of fiscal chicken with the President and foresees a huge new wave of the Tea Party.

In my interview (here at 31:30) I asked Norquist about his being the latest Obama and Obama Media diversion in what is supposed to be a serious discussion about the future

of taxation and spending. He brushed it off saying he’s used to it. He also said the President is the least serious player in the legislative scrum.  He was heartened by the way Republican Senators were demanding today that any ‘fiscal cliff’ negotiations be on C-Span and any bill forthcoming should be on the web for at least a week was a “big break through; good stuff.” In fact, he said, “I think we have a shot at [getting transparency] it; I think this is breaking well.”

Norquist claims the President is poised to overplay his hand again,

He is overplaying his mandate, just as he did four years ago. Four years ago, he took a 70% support level and drove it down to below 50% in a matter of months by spending all that crazy money on stimulus and TARP II and other spending programs, because somehow he thought the American people had signed up for this. They hadn’t. Now he thinks they’ve signed up for massive tax increases as well as spending increases and, I’ve got news for him, 86% of his ads were Romney’s an idiot, Romney will give you cancer. He won a mandate not to be Romney, OK? Not the same thing as a mandate to tax and spend.

There’s much more about the discussion that I’ll put in a new post tomorrow, but consider what he said about the Tea Party involvement in this discussion of the ‘fiscal cliff.’

We are about to have a Tea Party second wave that will dwarf the first wave and that is because while ‘spend too much’ brought the Tea Party into existence, we’re about to walk into ‘spend too much, regulate too much, and tax too much, all together. It’s going to be a perfect storm of annoying government behavior, which is devastating to the economy, and I think the small business community which is particularly hit by Obama’s tax increases are going to lead the fight bigger, stronger, tougher than the last Tea Party.

He’s not the only one who believes this.