Time for GOP Establishment (& Trump Supporters) to Unite Behind Ted Cruz

Mitt Romney's speech against Donald Trump is not likely to win many converts. Romney's remarks will just further vindicate and entrench Trump supporters.

Romney, though a good man, is quintessentially GOP establishment and has shown, by his speech, that he still doesn't understand the role he and his colleagues have played in bringing about the Trump surge.

During campaign season, these guys always seem to get it. They profess to understand how destructive President Obama's agenda is, but once they're elected, they lose their will to fight, which makes many conservatives believe they didn't believe their own rhetoric in the first place.

I know, Republicans tell us that the GOP leadership has done all it can to stop Obama but there's only so much a congressional majority can do. That's also what they said about congressional minorities when they were a minority.

Regardless, they haven't presented their case to the American people with conviction during the past seven years, except in the runup to elections. They didn't point out Obama's evil intentions and often denounced those who did. They didn't rally around Ted Cruz, Mike Lee or a handful of others who tried to stymie Obama. Instead, they chose to ridicule and marginalize these fighters.

Even to this day, the establishment fails to understand the legitimate concerns millions of Americans have over illegal immigration.

Establishment types arrogantly and unfairly slander border hawks as nativists, suggesting their opposition to open borders is race-based.

It's not about race; it's about our national sovereignty, the rule of law, protecting jobs, protecting Americans against criminal elements and jihadis, and stanching an invasion of people who will further burden our welfare state -- not assimilate, not embrace the American idea -- and vote almost solely Democratic.

A sovereign nation must control its borders and encourage immigrants to assimilate and embrace the unique American experiment. But Democrats are for flooding the borders for all the wrong reasons, and large swaths of the Republican establishment have affirmatively aided and abetted them.

We've watched as Republicans have allowed many of Obama's budgets to sail through under the radar, on the pretense of just waiting for the next election. Our guys don't even talk about entitlement reform anymore, though they were telling us just a few years ago that we were about to go bankrupt.

The Republican Party has been so tone-deaf to these real concerns that some Republican voters are furious enough to have chosen a wildly flawed solution in Donald Trump. One person on Twitter said she is so disgusted she is going to vote Democratic for the first time in 40 years.

It is tragic that true conservatives, however, are being lumped in and punished for the betrayals of centrist Republicans. Trump supporters are adamant that no elected official escape the blame. Their solution is to burn the house down and rebuild it around Trump, even though they can't be sure what he'd do when elected.

People wonder why they would turn to someone like Trump. The GOP, after all, has stood for moral principles, manners and adult behavior, and Trump seems to exhibit none of those things. In many ways, he is the opposite of conservative principles, in demeanor, lifestyle and his personal conduct in the campaign.

But in their disgust at the Republican establishment, they are throwing out true conservatives and also certain conservative principles and values, as if all of conservatism has been tainted by a party that betrayed its base.

How else does it make sense that even valid, troubling criticisms of Trump seem to help him more than hurt him?

I think it's because this disaffected class of voters wants someone unorthodox enough to break the rules, someone brash enough not to be deterred by the niceties that have prevented establishment Republicans from distinguishing themselves from Obama in bold colors rather than pale pastels. They're seem not only not offended but invigorated by someone who'll hurl profanities and refuse to apologize even when he owes an apology, because they think it's going to take someone like that to resist pressure to betray them once he's elected.

And though the establishment has finally awakened to the intensity of the discontentment among the party rank and file, it still doesn't believe the angst is legitimate. The establishment is still in bitter denial and wouldn't support a person advocating many of Trump's ideas even if he were a paragon of moral rectitude.

If establishment Republicans were the least bit repentant about their betrayals, truly believed in the conservative principles embodied in their party's platform and were realistic about stopping Trump, they'd quit posturing and unite behind Ted Cruz.

For the way to defeat Donald Trump is not to deny him a majority and steal the nomination from him at the convention; that really would be the end of the party. It is to embrace the closest thing to a Reagan conservative since Ronald Reagan, before it's too late. But truth be told, they probably hate Cruz worse than they hate Trump.

I wish Trump supporters would consider this when they wrongly lump Cruz in with the establishment, and I wish they'd simmer down long enough to recognize that Cruz represents the answer to their complaints far more than Trump -- and with none of the baggage.

I am a pretty reasonable person, at times, so let me fill you in on something maybe people haven’t thought of:

If you think the ‘bombs’ being thrown at Trump right are hard, wait until Trump or Cruz meets Hillary at her finest...

Trump is tough, and he can take it, I don’t know about Cruz, I don’t care enough about him to even count, so here we are, one of them is going to have to go up against the shrill herself....the media, DNC, talking heads, foreign leaders she’s paid off, everybody and their dogs are going to protect her and there isn’t going to be a thing to fight back with, unless you start collecting articles now, and I have been since 2012; so I have the ‘ammo’ to hit back and so does Trump, she is the ‘New World Order’ darling and don’t think that isn’t the truth...

When Trump warned Cruz about his birther situation, he wasn’t being mean as a lot took it to mean, he was warning him he had better clean it up because Hillary will use it and it will be ‘turned around’ to her benefit, and his weak statement of ‘my mother was born in America’ isn’t going to mean a tinker’s damn to her, she’ll file papers in every court in America, and those Judges will be paid heavily to side with her or their jobs will be gone, this is the Clinton Crime Family, they are killers, crooks, liars and a lot more and aren’t behind bars and never will be...

So think about this, don’t take this lightly, she will do anything and everything to get to the Oval Office, even assassination if need be....

Jeff Roe is from Kansas City. He’s a sleezebag. So was the guy Ted fired, and so is the guy that replaced him - busted for hiring illegal aliens - twice.

There’s no doubt Jeff is well versed in gutter politics.

“It was Mr. Roe who hired Mr. Tyler to be the Cruz campaign’s spokesman. (In an interview this month, Mr. Tyler said he had “learned a lot” from Mr. Roe. “Jeff wins,” Mr. Tyler said, adding, “I don’t think anything we’ve done is underhanded or deceptive or anything like that.”)

But back home, Mr. Roe’s allies and opponents alike have seen a familiar imprint in the Cruz campaign’s recent exploits, which have included a Photoshopped image of Mr. Rubio and the misleading suggestion, on the night of the Iowa caucuses, that Ben Carson was leaving the race.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/us/politics/ted-cruz- campaign-manager-jeff-roe.html?_r=0

All been done before by Jeff Roe. Then there is this;

"Political consultant Jeff Roe, who is based in Kansas City, is Ted Cruz's campaign manager — and the architect of the Texas senator's surprising first-place finish.

Roe is hardly a household name even amongst the political chattering class. (He has less than 6,000 Twitter followers.) Locally, he's most famous for commissioning the mean- spirited ad that upset State Auditor Tom Schweich and may have factored into his suicide, at least according to former U.S. Senator John Danforth, who blasted "politics that has gone so hideously wrong" in his funeral oration. Roe has been labeled "the Karl Rove of Missouri" — and the people calling him that don't consider it a compliment.

But as last night's results proved, he knows what he's doing. Cruz didn't just hold off all the other candidates vying for Iowa's large block of conservative voters. He did it even while beating Donald Trump. It was a wild, complicated race, and you have to respect the guy who figured out how to propel any candidate, much less one who's thoroughly loathed by everyone he meets, to victory.

In an interview with Chris Wallace a few weeks ago, Roe discussed a few secrets to his success — namely, a simple message and strong branding. Roe comes across as intensely analytical. He doesn't just know how long the average voter looks at a mailer (17 seconds); he knows how long he wants you to look at one touting Cruz (45 seconds). "When we communicate with the voter, we want it to be simple, clear and reinforce our candidate's brand," he says. For Cruz, that was "strong Christian conservative leader."

A recent New York Times Magazine piece delved more deeply into how Roe & Co. made those words resonate for Cruz, who'd hitherto been identified mostly as a conservative, not necessarily a Christian. Writes Robert Draper,

"One morning early in January, in the lobby of a public library in Onawa, Iowa, I listened to Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, as he explained a central challenge of his previous few months. ‘‘Prior to March 23,’’ Roe said, ‘‘if you were to word-cloud ‘Ted Cruz,’ which we do every day — take all the Google mentions and Internet searches, dump them into a file and form a cloud — you can’t find ‘evangelical.’ ’’ In other words, voters were largely unaware of the Tea Party firebrand’s religious faith. To convince evangelicals that Ted Cruz was the ‘‘righteous’’ candidate, Roe told me, his team needed to sell him as such, from the very beginning: ‘‘Regardless of what you’ve got in the bank, you’d better determine the narrative of the campaign, and show that’s who we are, every day."

Last night's results suggest that effort worked beautifully.

Yes, Iowa is unusually dominated by evangelicals, and yes, if Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum are any indication, Cruz faces an uphill battle to get the Republican nomination, much less win a single state. But we have to hand it to Roe. Never before has a candidate that so many Americans find this intensely annoying managed to make it this far."

http://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2016/02/02/missouris-own-jeff-roe-was-the-wind-beneath-ted-cruzs-iowa-wings

Nothing like this is coming out about the Trump or Kasich campaigns. If there was anything like this going on with Trump the media would be screaming it from the rooftops.

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