It feels like you can’t turn on the news or open a website about politics without someone talking about Texas Senator Ted Cruz.
For me, at least, one of the most infuriating comparisons I’ve heard is between Senator Cruz today and then-Senator Obama in 2004.
Ted Cruz is not Barack Obama.
Let’s start with this article, from Slate, about Cruz’ ‘Defund Obamacare” movement.
“The Obama White House operates on the assumption Republicans will surrender on every major issue,” said Cruz. What he needed were 63 days of Republican activists putting the fear into the party if it didn’t defund Obamacare, and great communicators shifting the blame for a shutdown from Republicans to Obama. “If we got to this fight, they ought to be on television every hour of the day, asking: Why is President Obama shutting down your government, because he’s so committed to forcing Obamacare on you?”
To make that point, Cruz argued that the 1995 government shutdown really didn’t hurt the GOP in the long run. They won “years of balanced budgets,” and in the 1996 election, they held Congress. “The sort of cocktail chatter wisdom that, oh, the shutdown was a disaster for Republicans, is not borne out by the data.”
What in the name of holy fuck?
There’s absolutely no way that the White House, which has faced six years of the most relentless, partisan obstruction in the history of the Republic, believes that the GOP will surrender on any issue. The only time the GOP has “surrendered” on anything is when it became clear that the alternative was global or political disaster. The extracted the maximum amount of concessions possible over the last debt ceiling fight, and finally pushed Harry Reid into openly threatening the “nuclear option” in the Senate. For Cruz to assume that the Obama White House believes he and his party are just going to roll over and die is downright delusional.
On the subject of Obamacare, it was passed by a Congressional majority, signed into law by the President, and upheld (mostly) by a conservative-leaning Supreme Court. At this point, the GOP is the guy that says “best two out of three”, then changes it to “best three out of five”, and so on. At some point, you have to acknowledge that Obamacare is happening. The GOP had the opportunity, and still does for that matter, to provide input and suggestions to areas they feel could use improvement. So far, the GOP has failed to do that, content on heckling and vilifying anyone attempting to make the law better. Consequently, the idea that Congressional Republicans are going to get on cable TV and pin a government shutdown, which polls universally show the general public will absolutely blame the GOP for, on the President and Congressional Democrats for failing to repeal the President’s signature achievement would be utterly insane if the Republican Party hadn’t already shown a fanatical dedication to the idea that politics is now post-truth.
Cruz’s statement that the 1995 government shutdown didn’t hurt the GOP is looney tunes. It cost Newt Gingrich his job as Speaker and Bob Dole a fighting chance at beating Bill Clinton. If late 90s/early 00s era Democrats hadn’t been almost entirely ineffective, we might have had President Al Gore and Democratic Congress. Oh, and those “balanced budgets”? Yeah, all it took was Republicans taking control of the Presidency, House, and Senate to flush those down the crapper, which should be a lesson to everyone: Democrats lower the deficit, Republicans raise it.
Moving on, we have this piece from Greg Sargent at the Washington Post.
How, if you are Ted Cruz, do you win the Republican nomination for president?
Well, for starters, you don’t do what you did to get elected to the Senate in Texas.
You follow the same path that you used to win an upset nomination for the Senate.
Sadly for Ted Cruz, being the biggest dickhead in national politics does not endear you to anyone except the people that already like you, which kind of precludes running for and winning the Presidency. This is doubly true when the people that already like you are facing a demographic black hole, and the people that don’t like you fucking hate your guts.
No, it’s not going to be substance.
Well that’s for damn sure. Once you get past the fact that every time Cruz opens his mouth he loses another percentage point worth of Independents, you realize that Cruz has done absolutely nothing as a United States Senator. Texas could have elected a radio tuned to Rush Limbaugh to the Senate with the same effect.
Instead, Cruz will use the tried-and-true strategy of calling the rest of the party weaklings and wimps.
I bet he shakes down Marco Rubio and Rand Paul for their lunch money after the Senate adjourns.
Remember, what this basically comes down to is a threat by a handful of Republicans — who, again, lost the last elections — to hold their noses until they turn blue, and to take the country down with them, until everyone just gives them what they want.
You know who acts like that? Spoiled children. I guess what I’m saying is the Republican party needs a good spanking. Kinky!
As a way to separate himself from the pack at the expense of his fellow Republicans, however, Cruz’s tactics are hardly insane. They’re irresponsible, but if Cruz doesn’t have the willingness to demagogue, then he’s just a brand new Republican Senator with nothing to show for his first six months in office, and no plans to add anything substantive to his record before his already-begun presidential run. So expect plenty more of this in the months to come. After all, it may be hurtful for the nation and destructive for his party, but it’s a lot easier than actually doing real (conservative) policy work.
The worst thing about Ted Cruz is the last sentence. By all accounts, Cruz is a smart guy. He just has no interest in even being perceived as a Paul Ryan-style policy wonk. He could be coming up with conservative alternatives to liberal policies, but he’d rather demagogue instead.
So far I’ve discussed Ted Cruz’s many failings, but I haven’t really answered the question posed by the title. Somewhere between 1970 and today, the GOP forgot Lesson Number 2.
Conservatives didn’t always believe the crap they’re peddling today. In fact, George H. W. Bush called it what it was in the 1980 Republican Presidential primary.
Right there is when you can begin to see the winds change. Bush I went from calling Ronald Reagan’s economic plan “voodoo economics” to endorsing it and saying he never said it, right after he was elected Vice President. After that, the GOP bought into it. The same case can be made for a hundred other conservative political positions; they thought it was crap until someone ran on it and won, and suddenly it’s gospel.
Now, policies are one thing, but what happens when it becomes personal?
From Annie Laurie at Balloon Juice:
But I’m getting the impression that Cruz is so impressed with his new “gravitas” that he’s fallen for his own hype (traditionally the professional grifter’s greatest pitfall), and now sees himself following in the footsteps of quite a different role model. Hey, if a brand-new Senator from an unimportant Midwestern state can rocket to the White House and a Nobel Peace Prize in just four years, why not a sterling fellow like Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz?
That’s not the first time I’ve heard that theory.
To become President, Barack Obama had to beat two very experienced campaigners in Hillary Clinton and John McCain. If the economy hadn’t tanked, there’s a case to be made that Hillary would have beaten him. Before that, he smacked around Alan Keyes in his Senate run. Ted Cruz beat the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, David Dewhurst, in a runoff election in the midst of the massive 2010 Republican wave election. With the relative likelihood of facing either Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden in 2016, either backed by Obama’s outstanding campaign organization, could Ted Cruz be the next Barack Obama?
Let’s just say, I wouldn’t bet on it.
