Stephen Calabria
Posted on 10/18/2013 10:32:38 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
These days there doesn't seem to be a politician in America who is both as loved and hated as Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
With the adoration of Tea Partiers and the antipathy of just about everyone else, the newest conservative it-boy has captured the nation's political imagination. Following his now-infamous 21-hour fauxlibuster, his political puppetry of the House of Representatives that all but assured the government shutdown, and the fact that Cruz's poll numbers with conservative Republicans have skyrocketed while the overall public view of the Tea Party has tanked, the one question on everyone's mind is: What's next for Ted Cruz? The answer may lie in the story of another Senate icon from the Lone Star State, Lyndon Johnson.
At first blush, comparing Lyndon Johnson to Ted Cruz comes off as ridiculous and contrived. Their many differences are manifest to political onlookers, a list that appropriately begins with their respective approaches to the Senate and their colleagues in that chamber. During his 12 years in the Senate — including a six-year stint as Senate majority leader — Lyndon Johnson ruled with an iron fist. A master of negotiation and manipulation, Johnson almost always knew how to get other senators to fall in line behind him.
"The beautiful thing about Lyndon Johnson," says the political scientist Sean Theriault, "was that he knew more about the constituencies of most of the Senators than those senators did. So he would study and figure out what it is exactly that each senator would need in order to sign onto the plans that Lyndon Johnson had in the Senate."
This wheeling-and-dealing approach to enacting policy goals could not be more different than that of Cruz. Cruz appears to take pleasure in agitating his colleagues, a style that has led to a less-than-stellar relationship with his fellow members of Congress.
"[Ted Cruz] is going to utilize the space that the media is giving him to really attack the institution from the outside, but without any collegiality whatsoever to his fellow colleagues in the Senate who he might be hurting," Theriault continues. "In fact I would even go so far as to say that, if there's any collateral damage in his relationships with other senators, all the better, because it only proves even more what an outsider he truly is."
Collegiality is hardly the only area in which the two senators part ways. Another is the constituency to which the senators have chosen to appeal. This hearkens back to the insider game versus the outsider game, the era in which power was sought inside the institutional framework of the Senate versus outside of it.
"Cruz and Johnson couldn't be more dissimilar in how they are with respect to the Senate," says Professor David King, senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "[Johnson] completely embraced the establishment and the rules and traditions of the Senate. But that was the case with almost all senators then.
"Cruz sees his main constituency not within the Senate but... outside the Senate. And that's a constituency that sees the Senate as the enemy — as a re-election of a corrupted and ineffective government. So Senator Cruz, because his main focus is outside of the Senate, treats his fellow senators as if they are corrupted themselves, and part of a corrupted system."
While the two mens' actual constituencies could not be more different, it is this skillful maximization of their bases of support that is perhaps their greatest similarity. Professor Gregory Wawro, the deputy chair of Columbia University's department of political science and an acclaimed congressional historian, shares this assessment.
"They both come from particular wings of their parties. Ted Cruz is coming from the much more conservative, Tea Party wing of the Republicans. Johnson was from the Southern wing of the party. In that sense they both have, sort of, coalitions within a coalition that supports them. For Johnson, his coalition that formed behind him, of Southern Democrats, helped propel him to the highest office in the land. I suspect that Ted Cruz might be thinking along the same lines — that by doing what he’s doing, by interacting with the individuals in the House, that he’s basically trying to bolster this coalition within a coalition. I suspect because of higher aspirations."
Those suspicions of higher aspirations have been readily stoked by Cruz: he has already made several trips to the early presidential primary states, despite having spent less than a year in Washington. This in-your-face approach was shared by Johnson, who points out geared many of his decisions while in the Senate towards a future presidential run, as Professor King points out.
"Johnson was confrontational with his colleagues, almost always strategically, and I think Senator Cruz is confrontational with the American public, presumably also strategically. They both used conflict and tension productively on behalf of things that they care about."
A full-on confrontational approach could, however, prove detrimental to Cruz's presidential ambitions. Many of the political right's most ardently conservative politicians were popular for a while and then flamed out due to their hyper-partisanship. Professor Wawro points to this as possible evidence that Cruz may be approaching the end of his shelf life.
"People who have, especially from the more Tea Party wing of the Republican party, been pushing more extreme stances, being more in the spotlight, I don’t think has served them very well with respect to aspirations to higher office. Michele Bachmann, she’s giving up her seat in the House. It doesn’t seem like she’s going to pursue, or continue to pursue much, her ambitions for higher office. Sarah Palin has been on the sidelines with respect to pursuing higher office. One could conjecture that Cruz may end up in the same position: burn brightly but burn quickly."
There is, however, the alternative view: that Senator Cruz's scorched-earth tactics will only continue to endear him to the hard right, the only constituency to which he must appeal in order to advance to the general election. Recent analyses and polling support this view, as does Professor Theriault.
"Among his ideological faithfuls, he’s becoming an even bigger hero... But I would say that his reputation, on a nationwide scale, is being hurt at the same time. And he would quite simply say that that’s fine, and he would agree with that. He would say that it’s his job to convince his followers that he will eventually win the war against the establishment. He’s hopeful that he is also persuading more people to sign up to his side, but it certainly doesn’t look like that’s what happening."
But even if Cruz were to win the presidential nomination, it's possible his run would be torpedoed by the GOP establishment. Indeed, this has already begun to happen. And should this occur, Senator Cruz may find himself wishing he had opted for more congeniality instead of grandstanding; more listening instead of talking. For, as Lyndon Johnson himself often said, "You aren't learning anything when you're talking."
Well there are Presidential tapes of him calling blacks the N word all over and saying they’d vote Democrat for 60 years because he gave them Welfare.
In essence made them the government pets.
LBJ was an EVIL, VILE man who made people sit around his TOILET while he was taking a dump!! WHAT A CREEPY ASS and possibly responsible for JFK’s death...well, he or his awful wife....who had the MOST to win by JFK’s death.
Thanks for bringing it into focus!
LBJ was just like a gangster of the Chicago 20s. Sure, he knew everything about everybody and what drove them, and he would use it.
Democrats never seem to brag about the fact that his “Great Society” ushered in the wanton waste of many trillions of dollars trying to eradicate poverty.
The only people that hate Cruz would never vote for him anyway... including all of the progressive republicans in DC that voted for obama twice.
That's funny. I tend to compare President Reagan to Senator Cruz!
There is nothing wrong with the concept of temporary help for months. The long term social nets have caused a lack of marriage, many babies born out of wedlock for the welfare money, free housing in slums, and a burden on our medical facilities.
Basically people on government support are government pets.
This is true. But Obama has made it so easy to tempt the lazy among us to use SNAP, WICs, TANF, Section 8, etc. to provide that “little extra” for the things they wouldn’t but with their own money.
Frankly, I am damned tired of excusing this theft under the guise of “there are people out there that truly, truly need it.” Nowhere in our Constitution does it say we (collectively) owe anyone a living at our expense. If you want to bring compassion into it, reconcile that with your God and your religion and bring that burden upon yourselves.
I see this theft too damn, damn much in my visits to WalMart. Fat bitches buying up all the goody crap and junk food they can get their hands on. Dozens of Yoplait Yogurt packs, multiple peta fruit pies, junk sugar drinks, very good cuts of meats in all varieties, and the like. They like it because it saves their TANF cash for cigarettes, lotto and beer. My country has 6000 of these leeches, nearly 18% of us. They live off the working taxpayers and THEY DO NOT DO A GODDAM THING except leech.
I know two sets of Hispanic families that seem typical in CA.
One was out of work, decided that was a great time to have a third kid. Used unemployment and all the goodies for two years then the welfare. Have a home in Mexico that gets a mortgage paid bye welfare even if they are not working. Had all their kids for free in CA and use all the programs to sit on their butts eating bad food in bulk.
The other family are illegals. Had a child and get money in many ways from government. Want another because it is FREEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
We need to pull the carrot and the plug on this stinky business. That is what we get bad people from elsewhere and why those lazy from here won’t budge.
Or maybe not. Thanks 2ndDivisionVet.
http://rangevoting.org/PresFraud.html
[snip] Lyndon B. Johnson: Johnson won his initial Texas senate seat in 1948 with the aid of massive fraud in the Democratic Party primary, aided by enormous funding from the Brown & Root Tobacco Company (which had picked LBJ as the man they were going to create) to pay off the Parr corruption machine in Southern Texas. Of course, due to 1-party Democrat control of Texas at that time, the primary election was the real election; the Republicans had no chance. “Brown and Root” later morphed into “Halliburton” and “KBR,” both of which laid a trail of worldwide corruption behind them for decades that continues up to 2010 with no sign of stopping.
Stevenson had earlier been the Texas Governor and had won in Parr’s counties by about 97% margins thanks to support from Parr’s machine. But in 1948, Johnson had the funds and Parr felt betrayed by Stevenson’s failure to appoint enough Parr cronies. Stevenson, who was enormously popular and had won elections statewide by over 80%, would seem to have no problem beating the unknown Johnson if voting were honest. And indeed he did in 168 counties versus Johnson’s 72, winning statewide over Johnson by 71,000 votes. But fortunately for Johnson, the six Parr-controlled counties in South Texas “voted” for him 98%, which, while not enough to get Johnson more votes than Stevenson, was enough to get him into a runoff with Stevenson. In the runoff, Johnson used his funds to buy enormous numbers of votes in San Antonio and to pay off other counties to get numerous 5:1 ratio leads. But Stevenson still was ahead statewide by 854 votes the day after election day, and since the Parr-headquarters Duval County had, e.g. voted Johnson by 99% (with 99.6% turnout), it seemed unlikely Parr could generate enough additional “votes” to put Johnson over the top.
No problem. The Parr-controlled counties simply kept “amending” their returns daily to keep generating more Johnson votes, with the final trick, a week later, being precinct number 13 in Jim Wells County, which was election judge Luis Salas’s precinct, which had voted for Johnson 765 to 60. Somebody simply “closed the loop on the 7” to make it 965 to 60, giving Johnson a statewide victory by 87 votes, and earning him the nickname “Landslide Lyndon.” The last 203 names on the voting list in this precinct were written in alphabetical order in the same ink and all were witnessed under the signature of Parr-deputy election judge Luis Salas; albeit this list later mysteriously was “lost.” (Much later, Salas and various Johnson campaign aides publically admitted all these frauds and Parr committed suicide when it appeared the Feds were finally going to be able to get to him on tax evasion charges. One of Johnson’s campaign aides, John Connally, became Texas Governor. The story is described in, e.g. Caro’s and Feinberg’s books. Too-inquisitive election inspectors and observers would be jailed and ordered out of Parr counties at submachine gun point; the homes and businesses of those insufficiently loyal to Parr would be burned. Three prominent critics of Parr were assassinated by unknown assailants.) [/snip]
Stephen Calabria
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