Shribman - The Pre-Primaries Are Well Underway Across the U.S.

Ordinarily the jockeying for the White House begins slowly, with whispered conversations and closed-door meetings. The potential candidates circle each other quietly and warily. The early commitments come slowly, and all parties know they are tentative, and mostly secret. That is how it always has been. That is how most political professionals thought it would be this time.

But in a campaign that will likely challenge every expectation, expectation has been the first casualty. Last week’s presidential-candidacy announcement by first-term Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas was the first public blast in what will now be a 19-month campaign.

But Cruz, a onetime Supreme Court clerk and a Tea Party favorite, merely formalized a campaign that has been conducted, in a subterranean way, for months. In fact, a set of vital pre-primary primaries has been going on for some time. Only now are they visible:

One of the reasons Cruz sent his followers a midnight tweet about his Liberty University presidential announcement was to gain a march on other contenders, especially Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, whose brassy record in Wisconsin and brassy rhetoric in Iowa thrust him into prominence and established him as the principal rival to former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida.

This was intolerable for the Cruz crew, which found itself gasping for political oxygen. His announcement last week — a rousing speech vowing to repeal Obamacare and abolish both the Internal Revenue Service and the Common Core educational guidelines, with references to the “transformative love of Jesus Christ” and unequivocal support for Israel — gave him breathing room.

But Cruz is not the only Texan in this campaign. Besides Bush, born in Texas and a graduate of the state university in Austin, former Gov. Rick Perry is hungry for a second chance at presidential politics, and he’s already lined up a formidable array of financial backers. And on Monday he embarks on a five-city Texas tour that he expects will fill his coffers for the campaign to come.

The 1988 campaign had two presidential candidates from Delaware — but from different parties. The 2016 campaign has two states with two presidential candidates each, and the choice in Florida — Sen. Marco Rubio or Bush — may be even more agonizing than the one in Texas.

There’s real money in Florida, and no one remotely familiar with recent American history is unaware of the importance of Florida in presidential politics. “These two draw different types of Republicans and different types of minority voters,” says Daniel A. Smith, a University of Florida political scientist. “And in a multi-candidate field, the relative position of the others will have an effect.”

Rubio goes out of his way to say that his supporters are different from Bush’s, which is a deft way of playing the ideological, the ethnic and the generational cards all at once.

Bush is a baby boomer, Rubio a Gen Xer, born the year Bush graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Bush is an establishment figure with a grandfather who was a senator and a father and brother who were president, Rubio an insurgent and immigrants’ son. (The insurgency might be more important than the immigrant factor. There’s not much of a Hispanic vote in Republican primaries outside of the Miami area.)

The Florida pre-primary is a class-and-cash struggle. But it’s also a personal one. Both men know that Bush, who once helped catapult a West Miami city commissioner into prominence and then nudged him into his Senate race, nurtured Rubio’s career, and now the younger man has reason to consider his mentor a menace to his career.

There’s only one presidential candidate from Wisconsin, but critics of the state’s governor already are arguing there are two Scott Walkers. So the struggle here is over which Walker of Wisconsin is running for president in Iowa and New Hampshire.

On abortion, education, immigration and energy, Walker hasn’t so much switched his positions as modified them. He’s the political opposite of a crab, which moves from right to left. He’s shifting right. At this year’s Gridiron Dinner in Washington, Walker faced the issue squarely. “President Obama always supported gay marriage and his position never changed,” he said. “See, he didn’t believe in evolution either.”

Walker’s most recent mid-course correction occurred three weeks ago. In 2012, he told the Republican state convention he had “no interest in pursuing” the sort of right-to-work legislation he signed earlier this month at a unionized factory. In 2015, he said the measure “continues to put the power back in the hands of Wisconsin workers.”

Well, not really. But the only drama on the Democratic side involves Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whom many liberals feel is an anti-Wall Street antidote to former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who at this time has no serious competitor for the party’s presidential nomination.

So far there’s just a self-appointed Warren commission. And it’s not the only one. Last week a Draft Biden 2016 effort began, touting its man as “an experienced statesman, coalition builder and productive public official.” Biden, one of the Delaware candidates of 1988, is unlikely to run in 2016. Warren has repeatedly said she’s not running.

Even so, The Boston Globe put on a full-court press last weekend, arguing that, unlike Clinton or any of the GOP contenders, the Massachusetts senator “has made closing the economic gaps in America her main political priority,” adding: “If she runs, it’ll ensure that those issues take their rightful place at the center of the national political debate.”

Clinton’s many gifts do not include flexibility and spontaneity, so it’s doubtful that this Warren surge shaped the remarks she delivered, only a day later, at the liberal Center for American Progress. There she spoke of the economic divide, particularly in the cities, signaling that the gap between rich and poor will be a major theme of her campaign. Those tentative remarks, however, will not cool the ardor of the Warren partisans. They’re not ready for Hillary just yet.

TED CRUZ - MORE THAN QUALIFIED TO BE POTUS - 2016
http://www.tedcruz.org/

Pretty impressive...
• Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 - May 2008, Cruz was the first Hispanic Solicitor General in Texas, the youngest Solicitor General in the entire country, not to mention the longest tenure in Texas history.
• Partner at the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, where he led the firm’s U.S. Supreme Court and national appellate litigation practice.
• Cruz has authored 80+ SCOTUS briefs and presented 40+ oral arguments before The Court
• Cruz served as a law clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Cruz was the first Hispanic ever to clerk for a Chief Justice of the United States
• Described as a ‘superb’ constitutional lawyer, the man’s considerable skills and laser-like focus were on display for all when he took oily reptile Eric Holder by the neck and made him
answer the damn question.
• In the landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller, Cruz assembled a coalition of 31 states in defense of the principle that the 2nd Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms.
• Cruz presented oral argument for the amici states in the companion case to Heller before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
• In addition to his victory in Heller, Cruz has successfully defended the Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds, the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools and the majority of the 2003 Texas redistricting plan. Cruz also successfully defended, in Medellin v. Texas, the State of Texas against an attempt by the International Court of Justice to re-open the criminal convictions of 51 murderers on death row throughout the United States.
• Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission
• Domestic Policy Advisor to U.S. President George W. Bush on the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign.
• Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, where he taught U.S. Supreme Court litigation
• Ted Cruz is currently junior US Senator from Texas. In order to win the 2012 Republican nomination for the Senate seat vacated by Kay Bailey Hutchison, Cruz had to defeat Texas Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst -heavily favored/backed by the DC old-guard GOP- in the Republican primary runoff. In the event, TEA Party favorite Cruz crushed Dewhurst, 57-43%...
he then beat Democrat Paul Sadler in the general election by a similar margin, 56-41. Cruz is also endorsed by the Tea Party Movement and the Republican Liberty Caucus.
• AWARDS: “America’s Leading Lawyers for Business,” Chambers USA (2009 & 2010) “50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America,” National Law Journal (2008) “25 Greatest Texas Lawyers of the Past Quarter Century,” Texas Lawyer (2010) “20 Young Hispanic Americans on the Rise,” Newsweek (1999) Traphagen Distinguished Alumnus, Harvard Law School
• On November 14, 2012, Cruz was appointed vice-chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He is now spearheading efforts in the Senate to have root-and-branch...
Godspeed, Senator Cruz- I’m all in.

http://freerepublic.com/%5Ehttp://reaganiterepublicanresistance.blogspot.com/2015/03/ted-cruz-to-declare-presidential.html

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.