Posted on 04/02/2015 9:28:25 AM PDT by Fiji Hill
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was born in 1970, six years after events refuted a theory on which he is wagering his candidacy. The 1964 theory was that many millions of conservatives abstained from voting because the GOP did not nominate sufficiently deep-dyed conservatives. So if in 1964 the party would choose someone like Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, hitherto dormant conservatives would join the electorate in numbers sufficient for victory.
This theory was slain by a fact — actually, 15,951,378 facts. That was the difference between the 43,129,566 votes President Lyndon Johnson received and the 27,178,188 that Goldwater got in winning six states.
The sensible reason for nominating Goldwater was not because he could win: As Goldwater understood, Americans still recovering from the Kennedy assassination were not going to have a third president in 14 months. The realistic reason was to turn the GOP into a conservative weapon for a future assault on the ramparts of power...
Today, however, there is no need to nominate Cruz in order to make the GOP conservative.... When Jeb Bush, the most conservative governor of a large state since Ronald Reagan...is called a threat to conservatism, Republicans are with Alice in Wonderland.
(Excerpt) Read more at utsandiego.com ...
If this was written by George Will, he is one seriously -——— up person.
Why does he think it has been almost impossible to win elections since Ronald Reagan, the candidates were too Conservative?
This guy should drop off his credibility card. It has expired.
Isn’t this the same guy who was commenting on Obama’s pant crease a couple of years ago? No thanks George, I’m sticking with Cruz.
I'd say Rick Perry is more conservative than Jeb Bush and that isn't saying much.
Frankly I don't need to bother reading the rest of his fantasy screed.
Reagan should’ve chosen Paul Laxalt instead for VP.
The GOPe wasn’t happy with Goldwater or Reagan’s conservative rhetoric in the 1960s either.
You have one in AZ named John McCain.
Military people usually get a pass.
Man, talk about a straw-man. I've never seen such an inflated bogus premise.
Flake is even worse than McCain.
Actually, my own taste in fiction is for the Victorian novel. But I thought that writing something with what is only implied in Victorian novels, explicitly, might help disavow young readers that Conservative values would somehow interfere with the fun side of life.
Of course, the difference was taste. Victorians had a sense of privacy--keeping private matters private. While I really do agree with their approach, I decided on the one you describe for tactical reasons. (In my defense, however, you will note that the characters tend to develope in a constructive direction--just as in those Victorian novels.
Hope that your mother-in-law's recovery works out better from this point on. God Bless!
Oh, goodie! Now everyone can feel sorry for him - that way he can achieve “victim” status and then the left will vote for him. Problem solved! ~ s
Maybe George Will should stick to what he is good at. Writing about baseball.
Exactly.
I don’t get it. On the day Cruz announced, Will called him a candidate that was “as good as it gets”. Why is he suddenly so negative?
In fact, the harder they try to marginalize him the more I like him.
“much like how no GOP nominee was going to in in ‘08”
I know what you’re saying (people were tired of the GOP in 2008), but I don’t think Obama was unbeatable, had he run against a normal Republican. Hillary, on the other hand, back then would have been unstoppable, but certainly not today.
That control consists of doing the bidding of the Dems even while they're out of power.
They are some nasty SOB's in the GOP, traitors all.
So if a candidate can sweep the moderates and also pick up a third of the conservatives and somewhat conservatives, that candidate can win the nomination.
It gets easier with time because voters flock to the front runner. It's not some conspiracy or evil magic.
All the same, though, I don't think Jeb will be the nominee. He's too tired and too hostile to conservatives.
That moderate group isn't what it once was either. A lot of them have gone over to the Democrats.
Cruz might be able to bring conservatives back to the party
There’s a difference between unbeatable and unwinnable. Obama was clearly beatable, just not by a GOP candidate that year.
A number of factors contributed to Goldwater's defeat in 1964--Goldwater's reluctance to run, strife within his campaign team, the refusal of the Rockefeller wing of the party to actively support him, etc. The election was hardly a repudiation of conservatism.
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