Posted on 08/26/2015 1:23:14 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
For the first time in 40 years, a Republican presidential primary in Texas will be something more than an afterthought.
The 2016 Texas primary will be the grand prize in a Super Tuesday sweepstakes that should define several presidential campaigns — none more than Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Back in March, when Cruz announced his candidacy, I discounted the possibility that his culture-warrior rhetoric would play outside this state, and wrote him off as a colorful source of bulletin-board material for Democrats.
Five months later, I still consider Cruz an unlikely GOP nominee, but it’s now possible to detect a path to the nomination for him.
On the strategic/tactical front, he has shrewdly aligned himself with surprise front-runner Donald Trump, meaning that Cruz is now positioned as an obvious Option B in case the brash real-estate mogul needs to undergo treatment to cope with his bizarre obsession with Megyn Kelly.
Cruz has also established himself as a fundraising powerhouse, meaning that he should be able to devote major resources to most of the 12 primaries and caucuses that will be at stake on Super Tuesday, seven of which are located in the South (eight, if you count Oklahoma), Cruz’s political and cultural wheelhouse.
He also stands to benefit from the wobbly dysfunction of fellow Texan Rick Perry’s campaign, which is gasping for breath and starving for money.
But Cruz’s greatest strength has little to do with strategic plotting or tactical good fortune.
It’s the fact that, unlike most of his 16 rivals in the GOP field, he has a message and knows how to sell it.
All that was obvious at last Friday’s “Rally for Religious Liberty” in De Moines, Iowa, where Cruz transfixed 2,5000 social conservatives with a performance that was equal parts testifying preacher and slick courtroom attorney.
Cruz recounted his work, as Texas solicitor general, on a Supreme Court case in which he defended the presence of a Ten Commandments monument on public property. Cruz pointed out that the state won the case by a 5-4 vote.
Holding up his right index finger, he said, “You want to know what this election is about? We are one justice away from the Supreme Court saying, ‘Every image of God shall be torn down.’”
It was an absurd assertion, but it conveyed a clear message: The culture wars are on in this country, and Christians need Cruz to be their wartime president.
By comparison, Perry, for all adios-mofo bluster, seems strangely adrift, probably a predictable fate for a candidate whose career has seen him shift from boll-weevil Democrat to pragmatic Republican to tea-party crusader to bespectacled statesman.
Cruz’s central argument — that devout Christians in the United States are being persecuted by secular progressives — merely echoes what we’ve heard in recent years from the likes of Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. But Cruz, the former college debate champion, makes the argument better than they do.
In Des Moines, he brought out Dick and Betty Odgaard, an elderly Mennonite couple who refused to rent their venue for a same-sex wedding, and faced a complaint over it.
Cruz overstated the case, constantly describing the venue as the Odgaard’s “church,” when in fact it was a former church that they converted into an art gallery, bistro and flower shop. He said they were forced to shut down their business, when in fact the closing resulted from their own decision to stop handling weddings.
He hugged them and said, “Your story is powerful, your story is inspirational.”
It’s a slick chess move, taking a group — the LGBT community — that has long been subjected to persecution, ridicule and physical attack, and depicting its members as the intolerant bullies of our society.
Meanwhile, Christians, who have dominated American culture since the country’s inception, are made to look like hopelessly oppressed martyrs.
Cruz should know that the Christian faith was similarly used at one time by bigots who opposed interracial marriage and racial integration, but he is either unwilling or unable to see the correlation.
He won’t win a general election by looking for heroism in acts of discrimination. But he could make some noise in the GOP primary.
I said in the begining that Trump was the guy that could wreck the Rat/enemedia defenses and allow a Cruz candidacy to savage their rear. Metaphorically. I read the other day that Trump’s “extremism” has turned Cruz into a much more acceptable candidate. The squishiness of the rest of the field is their undoing. Their nuanced attempts to be all things is their undoing.
Excellent points all around. The logic is sound and I see Senator Cruz rising to the top as he proceeds with his “steady as she goes” strategy.
I’m enjoying the hell out of Trump but Cruz is my man from the beginning and i’ll be sticking with him.
It would be wonderful to someday read or hear from a journalist from the right. Cruz is the only hope.
Garcia tries to minimize or spin the tyranny against christian business owners.
“The logic is sound and I see Senator Cruz rising to the top as he proceeds with his “steady as she goes” strategy.”
Last night, Megan Kelly asked Cruz if he would deport children of illegal aliens born on American soil. Trump said he would. Cruz refused to answer the question, dodged the question even after she pressed him. Cruz, who is supposed to be an expert on the Constitution, tried to make out that people can legitimately believe that the 14th amendment mandates birthright citizenship. That was very dishonest. Then he gave the standard weasel answer: We can have that conversation after we build the wall. That means amnesty.
“...strip citizenship from entire groups of people who already have it since 1930s Germany.”
You mean that illegal aliens who slipped into the country are citizens? Even Obama does not maintain that. Even liberals don’t buy into that; that is why they want to grant amnesty.
It was not an idiotic question, but something that has to be dealt with. And you can take your David Duke rant and shove it up your punk ass. I dislike that kind of snot this early in the morning. You must be some kind of miserable asshole.
Go ahead little boy, call me a race traitor like your neonazi friends have been doing then march your happy ass off to invade the Sutatenland.
Deport the parents, the parents can decide whether or not to take their children.
“Go ahead little boy, call me a race traitor like your neonazi friends have been doing then march your happy ass off to invade the Sutatenland.”
I don’t regard you enough to label you anything. Your posts reveal all. This conversation is over.
I stand with Cruz as we stand for Jesus Christ. He seems to me an honest person who is trying to do the right thing for God, family and country.
...Perry, for all adios-mofo bluster....
&&
What does that mean?
It’s a slick chess move, taking a group — the LGBT community — that has long been subjected to persecution, ridicule and physical attack, and depicting its members as the intolerant bullies of our society.
***
Poor writer and seriously delusional.
Mind your language, please; there are ladies present.
“Mind your language, please; there are ladies present.’
Probably so, but I wouldn’t want those ladies to think that poster had a scintilla of justification to post what he did. And that early in the morning.
Their kids are their problem. Citizens or no they should be forced to take them with them when they are sent home.
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