Posted on 12/02/2015 10:57:41 AM PST by Isara
The latest Q-Polls (which Ed already covered for you) solidified a recent trend which more than a few people had been predicting. The Donald may still be on top, but Ted Cruz is circling like a shark and is rapidly moving withing striking distance. And don’t think that people haven’t noticed… they have, and more than a few are beyond unhappy over these recent developments. As long as it was just Trump and Ben Carson at the top of the heap with everyone else in single digits, both the media and the GOP establishment seemed content to simply ignore the Texas senator as one more member of a choir nobody was really listening to. But now Cruz is in double digits, joining a very small, elite club, and is nearing a statistical tie with Trump in Iowa. Sweaty palms inside the Beltway and around Manhattan have ensued.
Ed cited Chris Cillizza, who described Cruz as the “sleeping giant” in the race.
Dig deeper into the findings and things look even better for the senator from Texas. Although Cruz is at 16 percent among all Republicans, he runs significantly stronger among three subgroups: "very" conservative voters, tea party supporters and white born-again/evangelical voters. Those subgroups are also the three most important and powerful when it comes to deciding the GOP nominee in 2016.
When it comes to the mainstream media, however, Cillizza’s may be the only kind (or at least objective) voice out there in terms of evaluating Ted Cruz. As a counterpoint, take a look at Frank Bruni’s 25 paragraph long hysterical diatribe against Cruz in the New York Times. To read the man’s panic-stricken ranting you’d think Godzilla had just shown up in Arlington and was headed for the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge.
More and more Republican insiders talk about a battle between Cruz and Marco Rubio for the nomination, or about a three-way, if you will, among Cruz, Rubio and Trump.
And in the voices of these insiders I hear horror, because Trump and Cruz are nasty pieces of work.
Cruz will work overtime in the months ahead to persuade you otherwise. The religious right already adores him, but to go the distance, he needs more support from other, less conservative Republicans, and he knows it. Expect orchestrated glimpses of a high-minded Cruz, less skunk than statesman, his sneer ceding territory to a smile…
Anyone but Cruz: That's the leitmotif of his life, stretching back to college at Princeton. His freshman roommate, Craig Mazin, told Patricia Murphy of The Daily Beast: "I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone. I would rather pick somebody from the phone book."
It's not easy to come across on-the-record quotes like that, and Mazin's words suggest a disdain that transcends ideology. They bear heeding.
That was, as I alluded to above, only a sample from a long, long essay. All of it is of the same distinct flavor. This sudden movement to Crucify Cruz (Cruzify?) is really just the next phase of the GOP establishment and their liberal critics doing just what they’ve been attempting to do regarding Donald Trump. The real irony in all of this is the same thing I mentioned back in the spring, long before Trump was officially on the scene. At that time, Cruz was supposed to be “the crazy man” in the race. Everyone hated him… and by “everyone” I mean the people who didn’t want to see a conservative firebrand who would rock the establishment boat running off with the nomination. Cruz has made so many enemies inside the Republican Party power structure that I doubt even he can keep track of them all.
He also built a reputation for being the sole person to blame for the government shutdown, though I’ve never been entirely clear as to how one freshman senator ever accumulated that sort of earthshaking power. He’s definitely had a take no prisoners attitude from day one, though, and that makes people nervous. The rather humorous point of all this is that Cruz may have been one of the biggest benefactors of Trump’s rise. As I suggested above, Cruz was supposed to be the crazy horse in the field. But once Trump arrived everyone forgot about him and Trump’s bodacious antics actually made Ted Cruz look more mainstream.
It’s not just the political Left like Frank who are on board with this theme. Here’s a tweet from this morning by Bill Kristol.
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is the GOP establishment mobilizing to fight the last war? Panicked about @realDonaldTrump, but probably should worry more about @tedcruz. — Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 2, 2015 |
I’m not sure if the panic button has actually been pushed yet, but it’s getting close to that point. If this race were to come down to a choice between Trump and Cruz I think you’d see some GOP power brokers jumping off the Washington Monument.
Satan and the Democrats whisper in your ear, “Hey Pal, why not vote for that nice RINO Jeb Bush over there. He's quite the guy to beat Hilary!”
I have donated to him twice already. If the Rats and GOPe hate and fear him, he must be damn near perfect.
When they fear him, that’s when we know he’s the right one.
“bodacious antics”?
Bodacious?
With Cruz’s multifaceted approach to dealing with illegals, he should gain traction with the immigration issue.
His idea is to deport criminals and all who come into police custody while securing the border, cutting off welfare benefits, and cutting off employment. By leveraging all these measures, history has shown that millions will self deport.
Five times as many self deported during Operation Wetback as were deported by the program, and the highways were backed up with people leaving when Arizona passed its immigration law.
This is a much better approach that the ham fisted, very expensive mass deportation plan and then expediting the processing of the “good ones” back in, also at great expense.
“The latest Q-Polls (which Ed already covered for you) solidified a recent trend which more than a few people had been predicting. The Donald may still be on top, but Ted Cruz is circling like a shark and is rapidly moving withing striking distance.”
Yet another one of these goofy articles with he same narrative. I wonder if these people are trying to convince themselves more than anyone else?
Because if this was the case, these blogs would not need to saturate the internet with 18 of them a day.
Look, Cruz is not close to anything. He is either tied with Rubio and Carson, or behind both. There is no magic sauce that everyone has been missing. It is a simple matter that the Cruz camp was banking on Trump to crash and burn weeks ago, and all of his support flowing effortlessly to him.
This has not happened. So now we get multiple blog posts talking up this magic “surge” that only exists from the keyboards of his supporters in various blogs, trying to gin up a narrative, I guess, in hopes of trying to peel people to him in some sort of “bandwagon” effect.
Cruz is surging, catching fire, ready to take off, circling like a shark....whatever.
He isnt going to be in first unless he goes after Trump himself. The plan of sitting it out and letting the press, GOPe, or Trump to take himself down HAS NOT HAPPENED, and likely will not. So now it’s almost looking like these people are panicking and desperately trying to push things through these articles.
Frankly it’s embarrassing. If Cruz had been Trump back in August, then we would not be in December having to have pedantic blog posts breathless trying to convince everyone that this was all part of a brilliant plan and it’s about to happen “any minute now”, or the numerous attempts at shaming people for being behind Trump.
. . . “antics” ?
Antics. I swear, libs can come up with some real doozies.
Cruz/Trump 2016!
Cruz is the ONLY one I’m sending checks to.
Cruz is the left’s worst nightmare.
It's hard to equivocate a "ham fist," which is exactly why the Republicans are where they are now.
Agree -- that's a word that I've really only seen paired with another word!
If this race were to come down to a choice between Trump and Cruz I think you’d see some GOP power brokers jumping off the Washington Monument.
He says that like it was a bad thing...
Catching fire indeed.
By design, by an intelligent leader who learned from past failures what to do, what not to do, and in whom to trust to help him along the way.
It’s been a thing of beauty to watch.
When the same result can e accomplished is a well executed, less expensive, synchronized plan that has been shown historically to work, why would we choose chaos?
We look into the stars at night and see tiny specks of light.
Cruz is surging.
The polls bear this out.
It is still early in the campaign (no votes have even been cast yet!) so whether he overtakes Trump or not (I’ll bet he eventually does), at least a consistent conservative is running against a nationalist conservative.
Because things like Corker show us at the end of the day, Cruz WILL "play ball." Therefore, results being "accomplished" is still in doubt.
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