Could Ted Cruz Win?

No, I don't think he will -- not the nomination, not the presidency. But since that's what just about everyone thinks, let's play around a little and try to imagine how Cruz could at least imitate Barry Goldwater and become the G.O.P. nominee. Here's The Federalist's Ben Domenech with three reasons why the conventional wisdom on Cruz might be wrong:

First: Ted Cruz matches up with the activist base better than any other significant candidate in a long time. I don't think people outside of that base really understand how powerful Cruz's appeal is to the populist energized conservative voter, which is of course just a faction of the right, but is a sizable faction ... And he doesn't just match up with them on policy, he matches up with their brashness, their yearning for someone who loves the taste of blood in his mouth ...

Second: To the degree that this is a nomination battle about who has done the most to fight the Obama administration about two key issues - amnesty and Obamacare - Ted Cruz can claim that mantle and beat his opponents over the head with their stances on these topics. We underestimate how going soft on both of these issues is going to play in the GOP primary this cycle, particularly in the early going. As I've noted before, most of the candidates this time around are in roughly the same position on immigration: either full throatedly in favor of reform or tepidly in favor of it. But there is no indication that the position of the party base is at all moderated compared to 2012, and Obama's approach to executive amnesty has made the issue all the more toxic. Cruz can argue that his only fault is boldness....

Cruz is Far Right.

Cruz pretends he is Far Right.

Trump pretends he's some kind of Republican.

Maybe some of you Trump supporters might want to think about supporting a conservative once in a while.

Everybody in the GOP wants conservatives to show up, money in hand, but nobody wants them to put a conservative in the White House, even when the alternative is another Communist traitor in the White House, frittering away our national strategic weapons stocks and giving things to our enemies both "soft" and "hard".

Anytime you guys want to play straight with the rest of us, let us know. We got jobbed in 1964, shot down in 1976, played to a tie (and then pencil-whipped on the sidelines by the Bushmen) in 1980, dumped on in 1988, '92, '96 (remember "gravitas"?), 2000, 2008, and 2012 ..... and still you want us to show up for the general election or else whaaaaaaa!!!, Hee-a-ree gonna win!

So ..... where's our stake in all this? Being told we're stupid, ignorant, and malevolent every four years by our own party?

So when do we get to play? Or should we be planning a day off in November, like you're still bitching about from four years ago?

Your guy said about the Texas primary that year, when Texans got jobbed by a phony-baloney "civil rights" lawsuit pushing a beef so bad that the Supreme Court prorogated, and then clubbed back down on fire, dismissed with prejudice, your Party and your guy Mitt stood around with their hands in their pockets watching while the 'Rats took Texas right out o f the primary race by forcing a six weeks' delay just as the race was peaking.

Someone asked Mitt Romney if he was going to campaign in Texas at all. He said no, no need to. "They'll come to me when I'm the last man standing." That's what your e-GOP players that you esteem so much more than Cruz supporters think of Texas's right to hold an election.

I’ve always been under the impression that, during the 1964 campaign, Goldwater did not run on what we now consider the issues of social conservatism. His calling card was plain libertarianism: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

As a Senator, Goldwater took positions explicitly opposed to social conservatism; as I recall, he was pro-choice, for medical marijuana, for gay rights, etc. I don’t know which of these positions extended back to 1964 and which he might have adopted later. But his libertarian core was constant throughout his political life.

So-called “crony capitalism” is misnamed. It should be called simply “cronyism”; capitalism has nothing to do with it. In fact, it’s the antithesis of capitalism — bringing government in to take sides, to pick winners and losers, and to grant or withdraw favors.

This misnomer is no accident. The label “crony capitalism” is an Alinsky-like trick of the left to try to discredit capitalism in general.

Barry Goldwater's definitive speech in which he shows both strains of conservativism together is his May, 1964 campaign stump speech (a major speech, actually), as a useful benchmark.

Like the Framers', Goldwater's social conservativism was foundational, all questions being framed in a Judaeo-Christian perspective. He didn't pound the table about the moral foundations of his arguments, because he didn't have to. Except in Hugh Hefner's offices and lefty-trendy (NKVD-penetrated) faculty lounges, middle-class morality ruled everywhere in easy tandem with small-"r" republicanism under the epithet "Americanism", and Goldwater needed not make any special effort to footnote where his social values came from.

Later on, when one of his relatives unburdened himself of his homosexuality, Sen. Goldwater became defensive of his kinsman -- after the fact -- as people very often do. (This became a focus of the loathesome Human Rights Campaign, which immediately began to surface people close to socons -- Newt Gingrich, Dick and Lynn Cheney, Jerry Falwell, Robert Dornan -- in an effort to force them to repudiate their morals publicly. The oberdyke of the HRC pursued Mary Cheney for 10 years, badgering her to come out so the HRC could make that "fork play"` on her parents. She did, and they cratered. Big win for the HRC and their overspread of society with a caul of sexual dysfunction and squalor.

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