Posted on 05/01/2015 9:04:37 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
When Ted Cruz brought national campaign consultant Jeff Roe to Houston to run his insurgent campaign for president, he knew he was getting the "bad boy" of Missouri politics.
He knew from experience, having himself felt the bad boy's sting.
In 2012, during his high stakes battle with Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst for the GOP nomination in Texas' U.S. Senate race, his likeness was plastered over a Chinese flag in an eye-popping pamphlet attacking Cruz's past legal representation of a company with ties to the Chinese government.
"Mr. Cruz betrayed our country," the pamphlet read.
The man behind the attack was Jeff Roe.
An outraged Cruz called it "gutter politics." But for Roe, now the 44-year-old strategy wunderkind of the modern conservative movement, it was not personal. It was business.
"I was a vendor on the (2012) campaign," Roe said of his attack on Cruz during a rare interview in the campaign's sparsely furnished 7th floor office in the Greenway Plaza business complex. "We printed what they told us to print. I wasn't a strategic decision-maker."
But Roe relishes his role as a "bad boy". The moniker is part of the press clippings he keeps on a web site documenting his pugnacious and sometimes controversial career in Kansas City. That's where Roe, who grew up working on his family's hog farm, ended up founding one of the nation's biggest Republican strategy shops.
The company, Axiom Strategies, has developed a well-earned reputation for hitting hard and early, a template Cruz followed when he became the first declared candidate of the 2016 election....
(Excerpt) Read more at houstonchronicle.com ...
But Cruz has not stooped to using politics of personal destruction.
I have yet to see any criticism of Ted Cruz that portrays him as he really is.
Awesome. Cruz will need this bad boy. Conservatives are probably harder on other conservatives than Democrats.
Fortunately, Cruz can take a punch without whining. Dewhurst was desperate, mean and relentless. But, yeah, Cruz will need an attack man, certainly. Bushes aren’t pushovers and will dish it out.
So Cruz can separate business from personal. Another good trait.
Cruz is not without charm. He can defend himself, but he will want to be above the attack level in a national race. This guy he has commissioned will take care of that so Cruz himself can remain charming and above the level of personally scrapping in the street. This will be basically true of all the candidates.
He’s gone to need Roe when he faces Hillary in the general election campaign.
You don’t hire these guys for nothing, perhaps Cruz knows that he may perhaps know that he might just be the GOP nominee.
Yes, I know, presumptuous, but wasn’t Penny Chenery, the owner of the race horse Secretariat presumpious when she told the world that Secretariat was going to win the Triple Crown ?
You don’t make those kinds of statements if you didn’t believe in you vision, product.
About time - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater
Houston Chronicle has put up a pay wall. Oh, well... plenty of other, free, news sites.
Plenty of folks here trying to do the same thing to Cruz. Then they will wonder what the hell went wrong and blame others....
So does his boss.
Very good news.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.