Posted on 08/28/2015 6:54:52 AM PDT by VinL
Of all of the curiosities this presidential campaign has produced so far, add to the list a joint-candidate rally featuring two of the most polarizing candidates in the GOP. On Thursday, Ted Cruz announced that Donald Trump would join him at the Capitol next month to protest lawmakers supporting the Iranian nuclear deal. “Glad @realdonaldtrump accepted my invitation to rally in DC to stop the catastrophic #IranDeal,” Cruz tweeted from his campaign account.
It was the surest sign yet that Cruz's apparent strategy of wooing the controversial candidate — and positioning himself to win over Trump supporters if (or when) the businessman flames out of the race — is starting to pay off.
However Trump’s magic-carpet ride through GOP primary season ends, it will be remembered for (among other things) just how ill-prepared his fellow candidates were to take him on. Jeb Bush tried this week, in his characteristically genteel way, to respond to the insults that Trump has been hurling at him like spitballs all summer: “There’s a difference between Donald Trump and me: I’m a proven conservative with a record,” he told a gaggle of reporters last week with his hands clasped uncomfortably in front of him. Trump, not just undeterred but energized by the reaction, told the New York Times that Bush was a “low-energy person” — a phrase he’s repeated several times, knowing that it tweaks the younger Bush brother — and took to Twitter to mock him for rarely using his last name. Scott Walker has tried to ignore him, refusing to answer whether or not he supports birthright citizenship and declaring himself “unintimidated” so often it’s hard to believe him. But the Donald’s diatribes have caused him to slip in the polls, too.
Not so with Ted Cruz, who may be the only top-tier candidate willing to embrace Trump. Yes — Ted Cruz is a top-tier candidate — even though he’s been more or less ignored by the rest of the field since he launched his campaign back in March. The most important poll numbers right now come from Iowa: They’re the first state to caucus, and the momentum a candidate is able to pick up there will be important in determining who moves forward in the race. In Iowa, Cruz is averaging fourth place in polls. (He’s running fifth in the national poll averages.) In the last fund-raising quarter, only Jeb Bush out-raised him in the Republican field.
A key part of Cruz's gambit seems to be maintaining friendly personal relations with Trump. While everyone else is busy dodging, ignoring, or attacking him, Cruz has welcomed the Donald with open arms. "I am proud to stand with Donald Trump,” Cruz recently told one of his TV interviewers. “I like him and respect him." They’ve managed to keep it positive even though both are famously unfriendly with the other figureheads in their party, and even though Trump raised the uncomfortable fact that Cruz was born in Canada when he launched his campaign back in March. The affection goes beyond publicly stated admiration, too: As the Daily Beast’s Tim Mak reported, Trump and Cruz have met up at least five times and continue to keep the back channels open between campaigns. Trump’s madcap trip to the border was almost a joint press event, but Cruz had a scheduling conflict get in the way. Cruz is now trying out the unusual Trump strategy of attacking one of the right’s most beloved journalists, Megyn Kelly. On Tuesday, he responded to Kelly’s line of questioning about how he’d deport undocumented families with an attack: “Megyn, I get that that’s the question you want to ask,” he said when Kelly pressed him. “That’s also the question every mainstream-media liberal journalist wants to ask.”
But for Cruz this is all part of a bigger strategy and a longer game. He’s been working to secure the same voter base as Trump since being elected to the Senate in 2012 — the base of voters who hate the political Establishment so much that being a villain to Democrats and Republicans alike is the entire point. It’s the strategy that motivated his publicity-raising faux filibusters, his efforts to lead a government shutdown, and his most bombastic public statements.
Trump’s temporary advantage over Cruz is that he’s leveraging a well-established and decades-old public persona to appeal to many of the same voters, and he’s doing it in a wildly entertaining (and fact-free) way. But in the long run Trump's strategy can't work: Winning a fifth of the GOP primary electorate and actually being able to win the general election are two very different things, especially if the candidate has shown no allegiance to the party he’s trying to represent, as Jonathan Chait points out.
Cruz surely knows that Trump isn’t built to last, and when Trump finally exits the race, Cruz will be there to pick up his base. Unlike Trump, Cruz is a real conservative — and it’s not inconceivable that he could win the primary. While the rest of the party spends the fall trying to tear Trump down, you can be sure Cruz will keep up the good relations, all while raising millions of dollars behind the scenes and preparing for the inevitable moment Trump exits the race. If the rest of the Republican field isn’t worried about Cruz yet, they should be.
I just gave you an exact quote for him. Do you have a reading comprehension problem?
The quote:
And of course in the quote Cruz doesn't say that he is for the work permit part of the bill.
I think the reading comprehension problem is yours.
If the writer of this article thinks playing up an ulterior motive by Cruz is going to drive a wedge between him and Trump, they’re idiots.
Trump is a BUSINESSMAN. In business there are always ulterior motives. So long as Cruz is upfront with him, Trump would respect Cruz even more by acting on a complex set of ulterior motives.
Sure, almost ALL of them have indeed worked here illegally and evaded taxes.
So why doesn't the "tough-talking" Trump also mention those people as not being the "good ones"?
He doesn't.
He certainly singles out the "rapists" and the "drug dealers" as not being the "good ones", which is great, but they are only a small minority of the 20 million illegals.
“The amendment that I introduced removed the path to citizenship, but it did not change the underlying work permit from the Gang of Eight,” he said during a recent visit to El Paso. Mr. Cruz also noted that he had not called for deportation or, as Mitt Romney famously advocated, self-deportation.
Ira Mehlman, a national spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates increased border security and limited immigration, opposes expanding the pool of legal workers the way Mr. Cruz proposes. And citizenship or not, he added, legal status still means immigrants take resources from citizens already here.
And why would he offer an amendment to prevent a path to citizenship? If he did not want to legalize them at all, why offer the amendment?
Cruz Press release: Sen. Cruz Presents Measure to Strengthen, Improve Legal Immigration
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) today presented an amendment to the Gang of Eight immigration bill that would improve our nation’s legal immigration system by increasing high-skilled temporary worker visas, called H-1B visas, by 500 percent. The measure would effectively address the needs of our nation’s high-skilled workforce by helping meet the growing demand for workers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. It will also make block grants available to states to promote STEM education efforts and increase domestic STEM professionals. The committee voted against the amendment 4 to 14 with every Democrat voting against it on a party-line vote.
Sen. Cruz’s amendment would:
Immediately increase the H-1B cap by 500 percent from 65,000 to 325,000.
To truly fix our broken immigration system and take into account our nation’s economic needs, we must put more emphasis on increasing employment-based immigration. There is a current shortage of qualified high-skilled workers in the U.S., with an estimated 230,000 advanced-degree STEM jobs going unfilled by 2018.
Additionally, more H-1B workers mean more jobs for American workers – according to a study by the American Enterprise Institute, for every additional 100 H-1B workers, 183 jobs are created for U.S. citizens.
Help retain the high-skilled workers that are trained in the U.S. by allowing “dual intent.”
This would allow foreign students at U.S. colleges and universities to enter the U.S. on a temporary H-1B visa if they intend to get a Green Card once they complete their studies.
Currently, about 300,000 students come to America annually to be educated, but are required to return home upon completing their education.
We don't have a shortage of STEM workers and we have 900,000 foreign students in this country. Cruz wants to drastically increase the number of green cards beyond the 1.1 million issued annually. A green card is a path to citizenship.
You are so in the tank for Cruz you can't even accept his position in his own words.
There are an estimated 2 million criminal aliens. From Trump's plan:
Mandatory return of all criminal aliens. The Obama Administration has released 76,000 aliens from its custody with criminal convictions since 2013 alone. All criminal aliens must be returned to their home countries, a process which can be aided by canceling any visas to foreign countries which will not accept their own criminals, and making it a separate and additional crime to commit an offense while here illegally.
I failed to cite the rest of the paragraph because the words in the rest of the paragraph ARE NOT the words of Ted Cruz and ARE the words OF THE NY TIMES.
Apparently, you need a break, dumbass.
I posted to you earlier in the thread that I was AGAINST Ted Cruz's H-1B increases. Did you forget that or do you have trouble with reading comprehension?
So that makes me the one who has criticized both Trump and Cruz on immigration while it is you who can't come to criticize Trump on immigration.
Trump-bot.
Okay, so we have ~~20 million minus 2 million.
That leaves 18 million.
Didn’t LBJ supposedly steal Texas for the ticket as well? We have proof that ‘Landslide’ Lyndon’s political career started with a stolen election, so it certainly wouldn’t have been past him. Would the electoral votes from LBJ’s TX plus those from Mayor Daley’s IL have been enough to turn the election?
I did if you read my posts. I said he undermining his own position paper with his off the cuff remarks.
That leaves 18 million who have violated many of our laws. How they can be readmitted “expeditiously” when there are over 4 million ahead of them waiting in line remains to be seen. Someone should ask Trump how he proposes to do that. As I said, he should stick to his position plan.
Yes, there were a number of states that were very close.
And if Trump does not flame out and wins the nomination and the Presidency Cruz will end up with a sweet job like VP, AG or Supreme Court Justice. When you are 44 years old its all good. :-)
Anyone who is informed about the immigration issue knows how to detect the BS from the politicians who try to deceive people on the issue. Cruz supports amnesty. Get over it. So do every other one of the candidates except Santorum and Trump.
Asked about what to do with the people here illegally, however, he stressed that he had never tried to undo the goal of allowing them to stay.
“The amendment that I introduced removed the path to citizenship, but it did not change the underlying work permit from the Gang of Eight,” he said during a recent visit to El Paso. Mr. Cruz also noted that he had not called for deportation or, as Mitt Romney famously advocated, self-deportation.
I hope you know how brilliant what you just said is.
Thank you.
Well, whatever these two decide to do, I’m up for it
For Cruz, you can use reliable metrics. I’ll bet that Cruz has the highest IQ among the bunch. That being said, you can’t put a number on other very important intangible qualities such as moral character, charisma, equanimity, honesty. Nonetheless, I believe that Cruz measures up in those categories as well.
“JFK won the electoral vote 303 to 219. Winning IL would not have put Nixon on top. IL had 27 electoral votes.”
Good point. I focused on IL because I use to live there and saw the corruption firsthand. However, what I neglected to say (the big picture) is that the same thing happened in TX. Fraud also run rampant there. Together, IL and TX threw the election to Kennedy.
He has little executive experience. I am not a big fan of senators being in the WH.
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