Debate Performance Cannot Overshadow Decades of Personal History

One of the aspects of the current campaign climate that I find deeply discouraging is the fact that the majority of the American electorate spends little or no time learning about the candidates in the weeks and months leading up to the primaries, and they apparently spend little or no time during non-election years paying attention to the roles that American politicians, and would-be candidates, play in events and policymaking that are happening both in America and elsewhere around the globe.

One of the shocking and disturbing ramifications of that sad state of affairs is that, for example, in the twenty-four hours leading up to the recent New Hampshire primary, a full 50+ percent of republican and independent voters had not yet decided for whom they were going to cast their ballots.

Every remaining candidate in the republican race has a resume consisting of decades of revealing statements and actions that define his or her character, integrity, accomplishments, honesty, positions on public policy, and the depth and consistency of all of the above. Yet the citizenry either has so little knowledge of those essential prerequisites, or so little interest in them, that a single 'poor performance' in a single public debate can often threaten to derail a candidate's hope of claiming the nomination. And a 'poor performance' can be defined as anything as superficial as appearing tired, or too argumentative, or too repetitive, or not sufficiently charismatic, or simply making a single misstatement.

Let's take the example of Ted Cruz. (Disclaimer: I am an ardent Ted Cruz supporter, thus the choice of him as my example. If you would like the example at hand to be another candidate, then write your own essay.)

Flippant sarcasm aside, let's look at just a very cursory summary of Cruz's resume:

Ted Cruz graduated cum laude, with a B.A. in Public Policy, from Princeton. While there, he won many prestigious national debate awards. He then attended Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude with a J.D. degree. He was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. While at Harvard he received many awards and accolades, including being dubbed by Professor Alan Dershowitz (certainly no fan of conservative politics), 'off the charts brilliant.'

He served as a law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, after which he accepted a position with a private law firm, and in that position was instrumental in drafting legal arguments for presentation before both the Florida and U.S. Supreme Courts.

Some of Cruz's public career assignments included serving as a director of the Federal Trade Commission, as associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, as domestic policy advisor to President George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign, as Solicitor General of Texas, and as Chairman or Vice Chairman of the following U.S. Senate committees: Commerce Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, Judiciary Committee on Oversight, Federal Rights and Agency Activities, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

During his service as Solicitor General of Texas, he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court nine times, winning five of those cases. He has authored seventy U.S. Supreme Court briefs and argued forty-three times before the courts, nine of those times before the Supreme Court. He has appeared in that capacity before the Supreme Court more than any other member of congress has.

In academia, he served as an adjunct law professor, teaching Supreme Court legislation, at the University of Texas.

Cruz's legal credentials and accomplishments have been lauded by many, and he has been recognized for his efforts by having been named one of the fifty best litigators under the age of forty-five in America, one of the fifty most influential minority lawyers in America, and one of the twenty-five greatest Texas lawyers of the past quarter century.

Since his election to the senate in 2012, Cruz has sponsored no fewer than twenty-five of his own bills on issues ranging from the repeal of Obamacare to reforming campaign finance regulations.

Whether or not one agrees with Ted Cruz's conservative credentials, the above abbreviated resume is the kind of information that any informed voter should have at his or her disposal, not only regarding Ted Cruz, but regarding all viable candidates for the presidency of the United States. I happen to believe that Cruz's resume is stellar, especially as compared to most others seeking to become the leader of the free world. Other citizens may hold a different opinion, but each of us needs to know precisely what each candidate has accomplished in his or her adult life, by what means he or she has achieved those accomplishments, and whether his or her vision for America is consistent with that record of behaviors and accomplishments.

My question is, how many potential voters, in both the primary and general elections, know any of the above about Senator Cruz? How many potential voters have researched and are aware of at least a similarly cursory resume about each of the other candidates? If the answer to both questions is 'very few,' then relatively meaningless things such as two-hour debates, and thirty-second sound-bite political advertisements, develop the dangerous power to become inordinately more influential than they have any right to be in a free republic.

I ask all of you, when you watch the next debate, to take note of your positive or negative reactions to each of the candidates. Then expend the time and energy required to research and delve into that candidate's decades of genuine personal history. Then ask yourself whether that positive or negative reaction to a possibly offhand comment made in a single evening meshes well with what you have learned about that candidate's history. If it does not, then chalk your debate impression up to the fact that that candidate had an especially good, or an especially bad, day. We all have them. Do not allow a one-minute glowing promise, or a one-minute slip of the tongue, or a few drops of perspiration, to eclipse a lifetime of achievements, or a lack thereof.

Equally importantly, if you see a political advertisement that claims that a candidate did something that would be deemed distasteful to most voters, research that claim. If you discover it to be a lie or a blatant exaggeration, allow that to reflect on the person making the claim rather than on the person being criticized. If you discover it to be a true representation, add that representation to your own personal research.

More than a decade before America was even formed as a free republic, John Adams wrote, 'I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading? A man who can read will find ... rules and observations that will enlarge his range of thought and enable him the better to judge who has and who has not that integrity of heart and that compass of knowledge and understanding which form the statesman.'

I strongly suspect that neither Adams nor any of the other Founders would today consider the watching of a few debates, or a few political advertisements, the kind of vigilant research that will provide the American electorate with sufficient evidence to judge who has and has not that integrity of heart and that compass of knowledge to become the leader of the free world at this watershed time in the history of both our nation and the world. I pray that the average American voter shows a willingness to expend the necessary time and energy, over the next few months, so that debates and political advertisements will serve as only one or two of many tools they use in their evaluation of the genuine character, integrity, accomplishments and vision of each potential candidate. Our Founders would ask no less, and our republic's very existence depends on it.

....Cruz/s ill-gotten win in Iowa will haunt him the remainder of his days.

Agreed.

In Iowa, Cruz got victory without triumph. Appears most people were not enthusiastic about his so-called win.

He keeps trying to spin this....but the fact remains that the super-smart obsessively ambitious Cru was so scared about not winning that he colluded to steal Carson/s votes.

1500 precinct captains got the Cruz message---Carson is out; caucus w/ Cruz.

Ben Carson's wife was at an Iowa caucus when Cruz/s desperate trick to get votes was in play. She asked if she could speak on the subject....she told the caucus goers none of it was true....Carson was still running. Incidentally, Carson won that caucus.

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BACKSTORY Cruz/s Senate election fairy tale has become legendary......portraying himself as a scrappy populist putting everything on the line to overcome a wealthy establishment opponent.

He was whining in the media, telling trusting Texans that he, and his faithful little wife (a $700,000 globalist lawyer employed by G/S), were forced to liquidate their entire family savings (of slightly more than $1 million) to fuel a come-from-behind win in the Republican primary.

NOW TRUSTING TEXANS LEARN Cruz did not liquidate family assets.....he got his hands on over a million dollars from his hefty margin accounts at G/S and Citibank......and did not disclose this on FEC reports (to keep it a secret from trusting Texans).

Cruz did not disclose loans on FEC reports (required by law) b/c Texans would have discovered he was not the aw-shucks rube he pretended to be. He continued the rube act in order to milk votes from trusting Texans.

At the same time, he also did not disclose he was a dual Canadian citizen......the Harvard-educated lawyer w/ two Ivy League degrees said he didn't know.

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Cruz told Levin he used the Wall Street loans for the campaign/s TV ads......but these loans have never been reported as campaign-related. Cruz does not need th

Hi joanie-f! Long time no see you -- it's great to catch up.

You and I always seem to agree, or at least 99.9% of the time. But here, re: Ted Cruz, we have reached polar opposite conclusions.

I've been following this race since last summer, and had winnowed down my list of presidential preference to two names, one of which WAS Ted Cruz. But after the low-life, nasty, dirty tricks of the Iowa Caucus and the South Carolina Primary, his name is now MUD to me.

I don't care how magnificent a man's resume is, if his character S*CKS. I had thought Cruz was a brilliant constitutional scholar, worthy of my undying support. But he has been conducting himself like a junk-yard-dog shyster lawyer.

I don't judge a man by what he SAYS, but by what he DOES. And what he has been doing to Dr. Carson and Sen. Rubio reeks of "end-justifies-the-means" moral reasoning, the sort of thing we expect from acolytes of Saul Alinsky, and the very model of the moral relativism that is progressively destroying our nation from the inside out.

He seems to believe that "All is fair in love and war" -- and politics. To WIN is EVERYTHING. Nothing else matters. "Might makes right."

IMHO, he has totally disgraced himself, and I will not forgive him for it.

And then he has the gall to claim that he knew nothing about these tactics being advanced by his own campaign and his super pac. Oh really??? Shades of Inspector Renaud in Casablanca: "I'm shocked, shocked, to learn that gambling is going on in this establishment!" ["Your winnings, sir."] Were it true that he had no such knowledge, how competent could he be as a leader? Who is responsible? Who is accountable?

The man LIES.

I know Cruz had garnered a whole lot of Freeper support, and the above observations may make me as welcome as a skunk at a garden party around here. But conscience compels me to speak up.

I can show you where to look; but I cannot tell you what to see. I hope you will go and look for yourself, and drawn your own conclusions.

Thanks, joanie, for an otherwise fine essay-post.

I’m still of the frame of mind to ask myself why in the world I should support an establishment candidate. All they’ve done is get to Washington and stab us in the back. They talk conservative purism on the trail and are pimps and whores once they hit the beltway.

And don’t think I’m giving Cruz a pass on this one. He voted for cloture on TPA and played the shell game against us with his final doomed-to-lose vote against it when it came to the floor. He even told us to look out for politicians who did that kind of thing. And I heard the April 2015 video AFTER HIS CAMPAIGN BEGAN when he says ‘control the border and then we’ll discuss what to do about the illegals’. I heard it with my own ears. I heard him in the April 2015 video AFTER HIS CAMPAIGN BEGAN saying we needed to vastly increase H1B visas. I know he voted for the idiotic Corker Nuke to Iran bill.

So, why exactly should I trust an insider the beltway politician again?

Might as well gamble on Trump. There is absolutely no way that he could be worse. At worst I get same old same old.

At best I get someone who lives up to everything he says.

At middling, I get someone who does some of what he says.

It’s Trump for me, betty. “The only thing I have to lose is losing itself!”

Betty, thank you for your always eloquent, honestly and strongly felt discourse!

My understanding of the accusations against Cruz are these:

1) That he was actually for legalization of illegal immigrants during the gang of eight 8 because of the amendment he introduced. I contest this accusation because it ws clear at the time (and I was watching closely back then), and it has been made clear since, that that amendment was a tactic by Cruz to force the supporters of the gang of 8 bill to vote up or down on allowing the people they wanted to legalize to not get the vote. He did this to expose their agenda, and he spoke patiently for his amendment to set the hook. And he succeeded. The supporters of the gang of 8 bill, mainly democrats, but also including Rubio came out against the Cruz amendment, and it was voted down and thus the amendment did not pass, and thus they showed that their real issue was ultimately getting those people the vote. I believe Rubio knows this full well and that it is he, not Cruz, that is not being honest about it.

2) That during the Iowa caucus, the Cruz campaign falsely announced that Dr. Carson was going home and did not intend to go to NH. But it is my understanding as well that this was reported by CNN on that day as a result of talks with the Carson campaign, and that the Cruz campaign reported what CNN had said and drove it home. It is also my understanding that the Rubio campaign did exactly the same thing. The issue became a big news item when Trump, pointing to his own defeat, and looking for excuses for it, indicated that if Carson had gotten the votes that Cruz “stole”, then Cruz may not have won. Then, of course, Rubio piled on to this notion. I lay the fault of this at Carson’s feet, as much as I like him, because nothing about him going home should ever have been announced on that day. I do not blame the Cruz campaign for passing on news that CNN reported. If members of his staff knowingly embellished it, he should reprimand them...and depending on the seriousness...fire them. But it is hard to blame people on the ground, in the heat of battle, when seeing a report from CNN that casts a bad light on their opposition, for passing such information on.

3) My own complaint against Cruz is neither of those tow, but rather his mailer that went out that looked like something from the government, claiming that voters had gotten an “F” in the past for not voting and indicating that they needed to vote in the caucus for Cruz. Did Ted Cruz himself come up with that foolish idea? I seriously doubt it. ut once it went out he should have denounced it.

As I see it, primaries are a hard fought competition at a very hgh level of emotion and political thought. Where every side is seeking to gain any advantage over the other. Are their things that candidates do during that part of the election cycle that I do not like? Yes...absolutely.

But sometimes all of us are too harsh on the candidates for what their staff does. Yes, they are in charge, and yes they should respond if they see something that they KNOW is wrong or out of place. We know that Cruz is willing to act when things like this happen because of his demanding the resignation of his spokesman, Rick Tyler, yesterday.

If I look at Trump and Rubio...they have done similar things and more...over and over again. None of the front runners are clean in this. I would say that Carson and Kasich have been much less so...although the both of them have made some big mistakes as well.

At the end of the day, we are trying to defeat an abject and open socialist/marxist in Bernie Sanders, or an abject closet socialist/marxist in Hillary, who has lied to the entire American people about so many critical things that it is mind numbing. Her husband’s sexual crmes and predatory nature, her own initial attempts at socialized medicine, her email debacle where national security was put at horrible risk, the Benghazi travesty where she made up a story about a man and a video, who himself was sent to jail, to cover for treason, gun ruunning, and an attempt to allow enemies to kill every American there that might have reporesented a threat to the truth of what happened there. Save for the unvarnished bravery of a few forrmer Navy SEALS and other Special Forces, they most probably would have succeeded.

These are the people we MUST defeat.

Any one of the current/remaining GOP candidates would be several orders of magnitude better than either of them, and would lead to a turnaround in this country. Some may be stronger in that than others. I believe that the strongest would still be Ted Cruz, and despite detractors, believe he has a record in DC to show it.

Having said that, if Trump became the nominee, I would vote for him every day of the week and twice on Sundays...and in a New York minute. I would vote for Rubio if he were the nominee. I would vote for Carson or Kasich as well. All of them are talented and loyal Americans IMHO, despite whatever other failing they may have.

The future we face right now is dire if we get another 4 or 8 years of Obama’s policies or worse. I must do all I can to stop that from heppening, and that starts with recognizing this political process for what it is...and being willing to accept that during the primaries these candidates are going to fight amongst themselves.

I wish it were not so...but it has become the nature of the beast and to one extent or another, those who get embroiled in this at that level get some of that mud on them. All I can do is look at them, their records, the policies they ay they will enact, and then make my best decision...both during the primaries and then the general.

I respect that each of us must do the same, and do not hold that against them. In fact I am glad so manty peoplea re passionately involved.

...but I implore all, no matter how wounded you feel in the primaries, to not turn your back and walk away from whomever the nominee becomes. That would only serve to help produce an even worse outcome.

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