Ezra Klein: So, do you think a shutdown is good for the issues and ideas you’re trying to push?

Grover Norquist: Not necessarily. I think the original plan for the Republicans was to move the continuing resolution past the debt ceiling and then to sit down with Obama and decide whether he would be willing to trade some relaxation of the sequester for significant reforms of entitlements. That was something Obama might well do. Democrats in the House and the Senate are very concerned about caps and limits in sequestration. Republicans could get significant long-term entitlement reform — all on the spending side, I’m assured by leadership — for some relaxation of sequester.

Something like that might’ve worked out. There was also the possibility, and I was an advocate, of pushing for delay. I thought Obama might do that. And even if he didn’t, I liked the idea of a two-month conversation over how Obama has delayed Obamacare for big business and big contributors and organized labor but not for you. So how about all Americans get treated equally and we have rule of law and delay everything? Obama was thoughtful enough to time Obamacare and its taxes to kick in after he was safely reelected. Those senators running in 2014 were not given the same courtesy. Why not give them that?

EK: That sounds like the strategy that got us the shutdown, though.

GN: No, the leverage isn’t the debt ceiling. It’s not the CR. It’s the sequester. Democrats think this is desperate privation. It’s like the Kennedy kids with only one six-pack. They feel they’ve never been so mistreated. So there’s something they want. And there’s something Republicans want. So you could see a deal there. And the leverage was the sequester. That’s what struck me as what leadership was thinking about, and it made a great deal of sense.

The second thought was to have a conversation over the one-year delay. A two-month conversation about delay would be healthy for the body politic. And maybe you’d get the delay. There’s no shame in the delay. Microsoft is always delaying Office. You could do it without humiliating the president.

More: Grover Norquist on Ted Cruz: ‘He Pushed House Republicans Into Traffic and Wandered Away’