Ted Cruz: Hillary Clinton’s wrecking ball

Cruz's announcement signals the start of a messy primary contest that will let Clinton appear to be the adult in the room.

Hillary Clinton’s embattled pre-campaign team breathed a sigh of relief Monday as a central player in their grand strategy to win the White House strode boldly onto the 2016 battlefield.

Democrats from both inside and outside the Clinton camp have groused for months that the all-but-certain candidate was moving too slowly in formulating and projecting a rationale for running for the White House outside of her gender and the dreaded “it’s my time” argument. She was relying too much on a platform of inevitability, they said — the same platform that doomed her bid in 2008. But those closest to the former secretary of state have counseled patience, arguing that a core element of Clinton’s plan was to get out of the way and let the dueling wings of the Republican Party savage each other while she floats above it all.

People close to Clinton smiled at the sight of the first-term senator wandering alone on stage at Liberty University, implicitly threatening a civil war with the “mushy” establishment of his party that he loves to decry — while at the exact same time Clinton sat comfortably alongside heavyweights from her own party’s progressive and labor elements, who have thus far entirely declined to challenge her.

“Imagine repealing every word of Common Core,” Cruz implored his audience while announcing his presidential campaign in Lynchburg, Va., in the morning, implicitly previewing a fight over education policy that he intends to pick with Republican establishment favorite Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor. It was just one line of many Cruz has delivered since joining the Senate in 2013 that highlights his appetite for combat even within his own party — an appetite that flared up famously when he helped spearhead the government shutdown in October of that year.

Meanwhile the clamoring of some liberal groups to recruit Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the progressive darling, was entirely unheard in downtown Washington as Clinton spent her morning discussing domestic policy at the headquarters of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank run by her allies. The presumptive Democratic front-runner sat near a pair of union bosses and current and former urban mayors, making sure to throw in some love for liberal hero Bill de Blasio, the New York City mayor, as she previewed pieces of her likely domestic policy platform.

She touched all corners of the Democratic Party in the morning performance before meeting with President Barack Obama in the White House and speaking at an award ceremony for political reporters in the evening, dogged only by barbs from her Republican critics.

So for Clinton, Monday was smooth sailing. For Republicans, her camp figures, it signaled the beginning of a wild and messy primary contest that will let Clinton appear to be the adult in the room before she takes on a bloodied GOP nominee.

Cruz “could go a very long way in the Republican primary, and give whoever emerges as the Republican establishment candidate a fight,” said Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist and senior adviser to Clinton during her 2008 run. “That is going to be something Republicans will focus on while Hillary is going to be talking about fighting income inequality and expanding opportunity, like she did today.”

“While Ted Cruz and other Republican politicians are fighting to outdo each others’ Tea Party bona fides and score political points with the conservative right wing, Hillary Clinton is continuing, as she always has, to spread her vision of opportunity and success for all Americans,” added Adrienne Watson of Correct the Record, the pro-Clinton group that has recently started mounting attacks on her possible opponents in the Republican field, including Jeb Bush today.

As publicly excited as Clinton allies profess to be, the Democratic exuberance is not universal, and the Republican National Committee hit Clinton in eight separate emails to reporters on Monday, including criticizing her for her notoriously high speaking fees and her history of a bad relations with journalists — her “pathological aversion to transparency,” in spokesman Michael Short’s words.

But most members of Clinton’s circles looked beyond that and the still-lingering controversy over Clinton’s use of a private email address as secretary of state, happy on Monday that this particular Texan was the first contender to throw his hat in the ring. They recalled the divisive Republican primary battles of 2008 and 2012, and pointed to the continued tension between the establishment, Tea Party, and libertarian wings of the party.

“Even if an establishment candidate wins, there is no question that Ted Cruz being in the race is going to pull the Republican Party much more to the right, and we know how that turns out,” Cardona added. “Just ask Mitt Romney.”

Clinton previewed her model of weighing in on policy while Republicans scuffle over politics in early February, when her late-night tweet about mandatory vaccinations after a day of GOP struggles aimed to paint her as above the squabbling. Her recent rhetoric about bipartisan compromise is similarly calibrated to portray her as apolitical, even as she has unleashed a stream of tweets aimed at congressional Republicans rather than her likely 2016 opponents.

On Monday night, at a journalism award ceremony in Washington, she spoke of the importance of embracing, but improving, Obamacare — anathema to congressional conservatives, and to Cruz in particular.

Still, some Clinton allies urged their fellow Democrats to be cautious, looking back on 2008’s Democratic primary between Clinton and then-Senator Obama as a model for how a lively primary could strengthen a party. But they also see Cruz’s ideological positioning on the far right of the conservative spectrum as an indication that Republicans are in for a fight, and that Clinton could benefit from the lack of her own drawn-out battle.

“The Hillary-Barack death-match was the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party, but that’s because they kept it between the ditches,” said longtime Clinton ally and Democratic operative Paul Begala, drawing a contrast between the Obama-Clinton disagreements and Cruz’s testy policy fights with his colleagues. “They didn’t run on radical, crazy stuff. They both ran on progressive, moderate sets of ideas.”

But as the primary season begins in earnest, liberals have not coalesced behind any likely candidate aside from Clinton, even as a Sunday Boston Globe editorial urged Warren to jump into the race and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley has been speaking out about bank regulation, ever-so-slightly drawing a contrast with the Clintons. Instead, Clinton has been able to consolidate the party’s influential forces, which her allies see as the starkest contrast with Cruz’s Republicans.

That contrast, Cardona said, is a particular powerful one as Cruz — who 2008 GOP nominee John McCain once called a “wacko bird” — launches his first withering criticisms on fellow Republicans.

This article is useful as it reveals the likely posture that the DNC and Clintonites will take as the campaign unfolds.

The observations about bloody republican infighting are apt. If Cruz does launch pre-emptively against other GOP candidates, it will indeed threaten to become a replay of the 2012 Seven Dwarfs, in which the media picked off one GOP candidate after another one, with the willing assistance of whoever was going to be the last one standing: a costly and damaging process that did nothing to help the cause, as we got Romney anyway.

Of course the article is tendentious, partisan and distorts republican politics; but it is always worthwhile to at least know what the enemy is thinking.

I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to reignite the promise of America.

I wish he had said "millions of courageous Americans" instead of conservatives. For obvious reasons.

-— Cruz “could go a very long way in the Republican primary, and give whoever emerges as the Republican establishment candidate a fight,” said Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist and senior adviser to Clinton during her 2008 run -—

The truth comes out... I thought he couldn’t win?

After he’s done with the primaries, he’ll set his sights on Hilary. And then she might as well lie down, ‘cause she’s dead.

Once again, the left puts their hypocrisy on the front page - they want to run Elizabeth Warren - who has less experience than Ted Cruz, but, he’s the junior senator - not ready for prime time - but, their ugly witches are? Where’s a barf bag when you need it?

Oh yes I read that one today, incredible. Juice, freakin’ juice! Is he going to demand how kids should pee next? That is a primo example of how leftists love to play dictator just like their commie fascist heroes Castro and Stalin. He has absolutely no idea what the hell he is talking about, he only cares about issuing ridiculous decrees and forcing people to follow them. What is it with New York city anyway constantly voting for far leftist a-holes from Assachussets? Bloomberg was a carpetbagger from Assachussets and so is Duh-Blasio. Maybe they should start thinking about electing people who actually grew up and lived in the city like Giuliani who actually cared about the city rather than wasting his time issuing decree after decree about what people should eat and drink.

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