Posted on 04/19/2016 10:34:19 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
It wasn’t a good night for Ted Cruz, who finished third in New York amid a landslide for Donald Trump in his home state. There was some talk, which turned out to be more hopeful than realistic, that because of the fact New York was a closed primary with registration rules so restrictive that you had to be registered as a Republican back in October of last year in order to vote in it the circumstances would serve to hold down his vote – perhaps even keep him under 50 percent. That didn’t happen; with 70 percent of the vote in Trump was sitting at 59 percent and Cruz at a poor 15.
But most of the country is nothing like New York. And even in the event Trump pulled all the delegates out of New York he still would have only tied the delegate count Cruz has racked up during the course of this month.
So Cruz wasn’t in New York tonight. He’d moved on. Tonight he gave a speech in Philadelphia which, frankly, looked more presidential than anything anyone has given thus far this year on either side.
It goes 11 minutes. It gives off the vibe of history in the making.
Here’s a transcript of the speech…
I am so excited to share with you what America has learned over the past few months.
And it has nothing to do with a politician tonight winning his home state.
It has everything to do with what we’ve seen in the towns and faces that have been weathered with trouble, joblessness, and fear. It is what we learned looking at the factories that have been shuttered and the hearts that are closing.
We have learned that America is at a point of choosing.
The media will say it is about choosing a president. But it really isn’t.
Our real choice is personal, and every generation must make the same choice.
Will we continue to live in the past with what we know no longer works, or will we move forward to a new and better place?
The people in state after state have made it clear. They cry out for a new path.
This is the year of the outsider. I am an outsider, Bernie Sanders is an outsider.
Both with the same diagnosis, but both with very different paths to healing.
Millions of Americans have chosen one of these outsiders. Our campaigns don’t find our fuel in bundlers and special interests, but rather directly from the people. The wide-eyed youth of any age that haven’t given up on the hope that tomorrow can and will be better.
Ronald Reagan and Jack Kennedy were outsiders.
They both represented a whole new vision and vibrancy. A new generation of ideas. Jack Kennedy looked forward instead of back to the first half century of world war. He knew that America could dream and build if we were set free. Not tanks for war, but rockets for exploration.
Reagan looked out – to us – the most powerful force for innovation that the world has ever known:
There we found the new tech pioneers like Bill Gates and a young Steve Jobs. They had vision and the freedom to build a new world that that at the time only THEY saw and because they were free. They challenged the way and changed the way all of us live, work, and interact.
Now it is our turn.
This generation must first look inward to see who we really are, after years of being beaten down.
Years of being told we couldn’t, shouldn’t, or wouldn’t. This generation needs to answer a new set of questions. Can we? Should we? Will we? Are we still those people? Those dreamers and doers? Are America’s greatest generations in our past? Or are our best days yet ahead? We must unite the Republican Party because doing so is the first step toward uniting all Americans.
The question is not whether all Americans can or will agree on a majority of issues all of the time. The question is whether a majority of Americans are hungry to rally around a set of principles larger than any single issue that a politician may use to divide us.
Tonight, I’m speaking to you from Philadelphia. It’s natural, when we talk about our Nation’s earliest days, that we focus our attention on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And we can learn a great deal about a path forward by focusing on the passionate disputes and disagreements among our founding fathers — differences that were put aside only because of the weight and consequence of the foundational principles they sought to proclaim and the price to be paid if they failed to rise to the task.
Today, as Republicans, we agree on a lot. And sure, areas of lesser agreement exist as well. But on the fundamental question: are we satisfied with the current direction of our country; we speak with one voice.
I call on you, as JFK did in the 60’s. And as Reagan did in the 80’s. To chart a new American journey forward. One that isn’t led by me or anyone in Washington, but by you. And millions of others just like you.
One where we still have differences, yet we choose to concentrate on what we have in common.
One that lifts others up and believes in the rights, responsibilities, goodness, and strength of all mankind.
We have so much that binds us together: our families, our work ethic, our ability to dream and build unlike any people in history. But most of all our charity, our love for our fellow men and women and our willingness to sacrifice for those in need.
Let us unite…on the things that have always made us great. We are great because we are good. Because over and over again we have chosen courage in the moments of crisis; freedom in the face of compromise; and hope in the face of challenges that everyone told us could not be overcome.
Our sitting president ran on a slogan that should have been a great first step…It promised us, “yes we can.”
Now is the time to take that slogan and put it into action.
“Yes we can” was a recognition of the hope that we can and should recover. The problem was that Barack Obama’s prescriptions only led to more elitist control from Washington. Less freedom for the People.
But now is the time, as Americans, to once again reclaim that hope. To take another giant leap for mankind. To speak the words with all the power and might that we can muster and use the words that have changed the world time and again:
The words that the slaves yearned to hear from the American people and Abraham Lincoln when they cried out for freedom. The words, that Europe and Britain heard when they cried out for help defeating totalitarian evil in the 1940’s. The words that led two men in North Carolina to be the first in flight. And half a century later the first man to reach the moon. And decades later, two men in their garage to come up with Apple. They are the words that will repair our tattered spirit, lift up our economy and those who are barely making it, they are the words that will vanquish the evil of ISIS. and return the rule of law.
They are the words that when Americans come together and say with conviction – they change the world.
They are the vision of this campaign:
Not yes we can, but now: Yes we will.
We will restore our spirit; We will free our minds and imagination; We will create a new and better world; We will bring back jobs, freedom, and security; We will find new ways to ignite an energy revolution with more jobs and greater choices; We will defeat the evil of Islamists and ISIS; We will live as neighbors, friends, and family in peace once again; We will heal the sick, feed the poor, and defend the defenseless; We will restore our rightful place in the world. We will do what Americans do best. We will live for others – we will change the world through the hope of freedom’s enduring promise. And our unrelenting spirit.
You can be empowered, and in a digital age it is all the easier for your voice to be heard. Your choices to govern your work, your education, your future. If only Washington will get out of the way.
Join me on this journey of less talk and more action because I know you. You may have been knocked down, but America has always been best when she is lying down with her back on the mat and the crowd has given the final count. It is time for us to get up, shake it off and be who we were destined to be.
Don’t let anyone try to convince you otherwise.
Here is the truth: You don’t need me or any politician.
But we do need each other, all of us, coming together as one, as We the People, because not only do we say – yes WE can, beginning here and now we pledge to each and every one of us, yes we will.
And now my friends, onward to victory.
The delegates Cruz acquired in Colorado and Wyoming were obtained not by the results of an open primary election or caucus, but by the election of delegates by GOP party activists who favor Cruz at the party conventions of the two states in question.
Those delegates were not earned by winning the vote of the people, but by selection by party insiders and activists. Anyone not blinded to supporting Ted Cruz with the “by any means necessary” mindset can see the difference in how those delegates were obtained and we don’t like it. One needs only to look at his polling numbers since for proof.
Cruz and his supporters will soon find out that those 48 delegates Cruz obtained at those two conventions where the people of Colorado and Wyoming didn’t get to cast their vote for the candidate of their choice will end up being the most costly delegates in election history.
I have to vonfess, I’M impressed./s
LOL, your posts are comedy gold.
Ted Cruz will NEVER defeat Hillary Clinton. He can’t even defeat Donald Trump.
I will settle for a priapic victory....
Hate the game, not the players!
By now it should have become obvious; except to those whose head is embedded in another part of their anatomy; that Cruz is a dishonorable, humorless and spiteful nobody, w/few acquaintances and less friends.
A bulletin for his fan club. He got his ass handed to him in New York which will be repeated across New England and the Mid-Atlantic next Tuesday. Say sayonara Cruizer Boy!!!!
Funny isnt it?
Ouch!
Cruz is that kid in high school who was smarter than almost everyone else. Technically he’s right 95% of the time, but you hated him anyway.
Too bad Ted is not smart enough to learn how to dial it back. How old is he now?
LOL he can’t even make a speech without lying in the first 25 seconds. Trump is an outsider not a politician. Ted Cruz is the politician and not the outside. Is it any wonder that people mistrust Ted Cruz?
Very good.
Not to mention Cruz surrogate and lead spokesperson, Mark Levin.
Who's dumb enough to believe that??? That's why Cruz is doing so badly with the public vote...The Party is what's shafting the people...We don't want to unite it, we want to change it...We don't even need the Party Cruz thinks we need to embrace...
We will restore our spirit; We will free our minds and imagination; We will create a new and better world; We will bring back jobs, freedom, and security; We will find new ways to ignite an energy revolution with more jobs and greater choices
Sorry Ted...While you are stumbling around hoping to find solutions to America's problems Trump has already proposed the solutions and they sound a far sight better than what you fail to propose...
Ronald Reagan and Jack Kennedy were outsiders.
Here we go with political correctness...Not many people know John F. Kennedy by Jack...Gotta show us some of that intellect he has...
My sense of Reagan is that as governor of a state about 3,000 miles from Washington, he was an outsider.
Kennedy was an insider but the ‘outsider’ notion was that he was the first Catholic to be President of the United States.
It was a big deal back then.
But I still see Cruz’s speech as one that ‘leaves me cold’.
As cold as the snow LaVoy Finicum’s body laid in when he was shot on January 26th protesting on behalf of the Oregon ranchers Dwight and Stephen Hammond.
Ted Cruz talks ‘religious liberty’ but refuses to single out the corporations pressuring the political leaders to abridge the First Amendment rights of gay marriage opponents.
They do run and buy our political system as Bernie likes to say about Hillary and that includes forcing Republicans to veto protections of religious freedom for opponents of gay marriage.
Talk about those Anti-Constitutional corporations and their executives, Ted.
I gave Ted Cruz money, but I’m voting Trump in PA next week and for Trump delegates as well.
At least Trump appears to be opposing a big agenda item of the corporatist crony capitalists, a wide open border to import cheap labor.
Bingo! Right you are.
I do not want any more from “losing Ted”, not even his concession speech.
It is over for Ted—game, set, match.
As they say, it’s not just a river in Egypt.
That was a stirring speech and I can see why Cruz supporters could be so enthusiastic for him even now.
>>>Trump will never carry New York in the General Election.. There are 4 times as many Democrats as Republicans<<<
Uh, are you saying that NO Republican will ever carry New York? Does the GOP Candidate even bother Campaigning there nowadays? You know Trump would, same as he will in California.
How does the GOP get any Republicans Elected in New York, whether for Congress or the State Legislature then?
I believe Trump might have a realistic shot at taking New York in the General being the Hometown Boy.
Your comment means nothing since Cruz would lose New York 90% to 10% in the General and that’s being generous. This is coming from a former Cruzer and a Native New Yorker.
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