No, the NRST is not worth fighting for. We have anger at the income tax, people see how much money is being extorted from them every year, every pay check for it. We should never replace it with a tax which cannot be estimated, cannot be seen, cannot be noticed. The income tax is smaller than the social security taxex. It is less than half the fed revenue and only about a quarter or a fifth of all the taxes people pay. However, they do not really know how much money they are being robbed by the other taxes so people don't complain about it. A tax which makes people angry is far better than a tax which people do not notice if we are ever going to get the government off our backs.
All of which points to the NRST as the better way to go. With the NRST, the entire federal tax burden of the individual is visible on each and every retail purchase. There is nothing hidden or un-estimatable about it -- it's charged on all retail items and explicitly itemized. Under the income tax, over half the population believes they pay little or nothing. Under which scenario do you really think people are going to get angrier about the massive size and cost of the federal government?
The government's big con is that they can convince the majority of the population that "someone else" is paying all of those taxes -- the "rich" or those "evil corporations" -- even if a large amount of those taxes eventually get paid, in one form or another, by the average Joe in higher prices, lower wages, and higher interest. With the shell game they play, this same majority suppoorts all of the government spending programs because they don't think it costs them anything.
But imagine instead a system where every time you buy a loaf of bread, a movie ticket, a CD, etc., you see you tax burden on the receipt. And when a tax cut benefits everyone pretty much equally, then pretty much everyone is going to be in favor of it. When the choice is phrased like "keep the national endowment for the arts (and some other worthless programs) or take an X% cut in the sales tax", then we can have an honest look at who thinks that should be a government program and who doesn't.