Posted on 01/14/2016 7:20:11 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Hide your kids. Hide your wife. Because the presidential bid of Rafael Edward Cruz--whom you may know by his stage name, "Ted"--is most definitely picking up steam.
The senator from Texas has been called a "charlatan" by Washington Post opinion writers and a "wacko bird" by Sen. John McCain. Although Cruz won't win any popularity contests in the Acela corridor, he has an excellent chance to win the Republican nomination.
First of all, his campaign is raking in dough. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that he raised $20 million during the fourth fundraising quarter of 2015, which was a 66 percent increase over his haul for the third. Just as importantly, Cruz has more cash on hand--$13.8 million--than any other Republican candidate.
Second, he has a clear strategy to acquire the 1,236 delegates that he'll need to become the nominee in Cleveland next July. Not only is the only candidate who has operatives in every county in each of the first four states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada), but his unimpeachable conservative bona fides will make him highly competitive in the March 1 "SEC Primary," when the people of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas will cast their votes.
By that point, he will have won a bevy of delegates, and the field will have thinned dramatically. While it seems highly likely that Cruz will inherit the deeply conservative supporters of the clearly doomed campaigns of Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, the "establishment" side of the GOP bracket--featuring Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and John Kasich--appears as competitive as ever. Eventually, however, one candidate will emerge from that scrum, and Cruz will dust off the playbook that launched him to the Senate in 2012, when he somehow cast the lieutenant governor of Texas, who was a multimillionaire ex-CIA agent, as a squish who couldn't be trusted to fight the left.
As in 2012, Cruz will frame the race as a contest between a conservative true believer and a moderate accommodator. Whether his foil is Bush (immigration), Rubio (immigration), Christie (gun control) or Kasich (expanding Medicaid), his opponent will have plenty of blasphemies to explain.
Cruz has also shown an adept political sensibility in handling the phenomenon that is Donald Trump. Rather than attack him head-on and see his campaign turn to dust, as Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal both did, Cruz has endorsed Trump's sentiments without aping his inflammatory word choice. By positioning himself as the acceptable alternative to the Donald (all of the conservatism with none of the vitriol), Cruz has quietly punctured the Manhattan mogul's balloon.
At this point, you may be thinking that even if he wins the Republican nomination, he doesn't have a chance against Hillary Clinton. But I wouldn't sleep on his chances in the general election either. A Quinnipiac poll from last month shows that matchup to be a dead heat, and a CNN poll from late December actually places him 2 points ahead. Plus, and you may be sensing a theme here, he's got a plan for this fall as well. In fact, he's already laid it out.
In January of 2013, Cruz, whose discussions of campaign strategy are reminiscent of Frank Underwood, advocated a platform of "opportunity conservatism." Get used to that phrase, you're going to be hearing it a lot. He urged Republicans to "conceptualize and articulate every domestic policy with a single-minded focus on easing the ascent up the economic ladder" and spoke favorably of simplifying the tax code, supporting charter schools and eliminating corporate welfare. Given that the big problem for Republicans in 2012 was the perception that Mitt Romney was an out-of-touch rich guy, Cruz's domestic priorities will make it a heck of a lot harder to pin him as some tool of the richest of rich.
Recently, he has also expressed a skepticism with Middle Eastern entanglements that could well resonate with a war-weary public. Moreover, most voters still haven't tuned in to election coverage, which means that Cruz will have a window next spring to introduce himself to the country.
To be fair, Clinton remains the favorite. The electoral map is still friendly for the Democratic Party, and demographics inch in its favor a little bit more each year. But the next time you hear someone dismiss Cruz as a Barry Goldwater-type who will lead the party to certain defeat, remember Sun Tzu's old adage, one that Cruz himself quoted in a New Yorker profile in 2014, as he discussed his approach to law and politics: "Every battle is won before it's fought. It's won by choosing the terrain on which it will be fought."
Cruz has chosen the terrain on which he's fought every political battle of his brief and highly successful political career. Are you sure he can't do it one more time against Clinton? The man is crazy, no doubt, but he's crazy like a fox.
Obviously written pre debate.
Bye Rafael.
The mask came off, and people saw who you really are.
He is a true leader.
WTH are you talking about?
Yep he is pretty impressive. Voting for him will be one of the proudest votes of my life.
If Ted Cruz and Donald Trump were playing ten-dimensional checkers and moving the pieces with their minds, which one would win?
I was not happy with is maneuvering on TPA/TPP, but I too will gladly vote for Ted Cruz, who by far is the most conservative Republican to run for President in a generation.
No one else is close.
On the other hand, no one as liberal as Trump has run for President, as a Republican, since Teddy Roosevelt.
Get back to us, Mr. Kurtz, when you have a credible critique.
I missed the mask coming off ....highlight that part for me please......
cough..cough. Mitt Romney?
Taking in corporate dough. Oh yes. Cruz will accept money that was going to Jeb and Marco and the other GOPe sweethearts who have slipped in the polls. But Cruz won’t be beholden to them.
Come on people. Cruz is no more independent than any other politician financed by big money. Do not fall for it.
they are hitting him any way they can, birthers, loans to campaign, etc.
They will not stick as you can see his honesty in his eyes.
Watch it tonight.
Like Ronald Reagan and Ike?
Like Ronald Reagan and Ike?
Nope. Romney, a liberal, was less so than Trump.
Example: Romney’s healthcare plan in MA, was the model for ObamaCare. For Trump, that isn’t far enough - he wants universal healthcare.
As opposed to Trump who has used crony capitalism to build his empire.
Just another of the zombie accounts Trump pays for
I can think of few compliments greater than to be disliked by Senator McCain.
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