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.
DING DING DING!!!!!!!!!! WE HAVE THE CORRECT ANSWER!!!
Not disputing your right to be outraged. Just asking you to couch it in more polite language.
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