Posted on 11/21/2015 12:42:02 PM PST by VinL
Ted Cruz gets no respect.
At least no respect in keeping with the impressiveness of the campaign he's built and his increasing odds of winning the Republican nomination.
The press and the political class are beginning to catch on to Cruz's strength, and there has been more talk of a prospective Cruz-Marco Rubio race, but his coverage and his buzz have been lagging indicators.. and they are still lagging.
After the GOP debate in Milwaukee, a Politico survey of Republican insiders had as many respondents saying Cruz won (6 percent) as Ben Carson and John Kasich (6 percent each). This is extraordinary.
Cruz tends to be an afterthought in the Sunday show chatter and on TV generally.
The Atlantic tracks candidate mentions on cable TV. In the past 100 days, Cruz ranks ninth among all candidates from both parties, well behind Chris Christie and just above Kasich, both of whom are throwing Hail Marys for the nomination.
A Washington Post analysis looked at the cable TV coverage devoted to each candidate compared with his or her position in the polls. It found that Cruz got 60 percent less coverage than you’d expect from July through October.
Donald Trump, as you might expect, gets more coverage than warranted by his polling. So does Jeb Bush. It's as though the media haven't been able to adjust coverage of the former Florida governor to account for his diminished stature in the race.
The indications of the strength of Cruz's operation and the shrewdness of his positioning are mounting.
He had more cash on hand at the end of the third quarter than any other Republican. He has major super PAC backing.
He assessed the anti-establishment mood in the party more accurately than any of the other traditional candidates.
He reacted to the rise of Trump very deftly for his purposes. He has seen a couple of key potential competitors, Scott Walker and Rand Paul, hit a wall or badly underperform.
He has a discernible ideological and geographic base.
He has, relatedly, a path to the nomination that is simple and intuitive (win Iowa, consolidate the right and beat an establishment that might be too fractured and unpopular to prevail).
He lights up pretty much every conservative audience he addresses. He is an excellent debater, and he doesn’t make tactical or rhetorical mistakes.
And yet he doesn’t really get his due. Why?
The political press corps made up its mind about him — too divisive — as soon as he showed up in Washington and has never gotten over its dismissiveness about his campaign.
The appeal of Cruz’s conservative populism is lost on most reporters and political insiders, who have a natural reflex to roll their eyes at the message and the messenger.
Cruz is not as interesting as Trump and Carson, and he doesn’t feature in any personal drama like the Bush-Rubio mentor-mentee showdown.
Finally, he is graded on a bit of a curve. He routinely performs so well at Republican cattle calls that his standing ovations tend to get discounted.
Cruz is hardly a cinch. Trump and Carson are significant obstacles in Iowa. His theory that he will inherit Trump and Carson’s support if the outsiders deflate is too simplistic. So is his schematic of the race as coming down to two candidates, one representing conservatives (him) and someone representing moderates.
Nonetheless, it should be obvious that Cruz is a serious threat for the nomination.
Be warned, and get over it.
And when a gaggle of leftists on the Suprme Court rules that the laws you pass to do this are unconstitutional? Hank
You’re wrong because almost none of the 70 percent who don’t support Trump now will go for him when their man goes out. Trump is doomed once it gets down to 3 or 4 candidates.
Hank
Good post.
I, too, am a Cruz supporter. Frankly I am amazed at how many here seem to believe Trump is one of us. He is not,
Yet if it’s Trump versus Hillary, of course I’ll support Trump - just as I held my nose and voted for Romney in 2012.
To be honest, if I had to bet a month’s pay today on who the GOP nominee will be, I’d put my money on Rubio. And personally, I would choose him even after Trump.
C’est la vie.
As that immortal bard Mick Jagger wrote: “You can’t always get what you want.”
Hank
Now you're over thinking it. You're saying the "corrupt Washington cartel" is now supporting the man who named the "corrupt Washington cartel." That just makes no sense. I can only think that in your world, EVERY THING....EVERYTHING....is about Trump.
Please bear in mind that we are talking about politics; dogs fighting over a stick.
Trump is getting like 90% more coverage than his poll numbers warrant. Ted Cruz is getting like 60% less coverage than his poll numbers. Trump has been getting a free ride based on his reality TV star persona. That is still not stopping Cruz from his recent rise in the polls though.
Yep -- most of the time, as in a recent story where Trump called Rove a "total moron," Cruz is totally ignored and only names like Rubio, Carson, and Graham are mentioned.
Trump's name is a household word for only ONE reason: he self-promoted himself to celebrity status. That's great in a showman entertainer, my hat's off to him -- over the course of roughly 10 years, through a well-executed plan of media campaigns publicizing the "genius" behind his great hotels and casinos, and then seven years hosting his own hit reality TV show (up until 2013), he made himself the kind of guy guaranteed to get lots of coverage no matter what he does.
Indeed, before he seriously got into politics, everybody already had the image of "brilliant genius businessman" firmly branded in their minds as to what Trump is. Great things in a businessman -- worrisome and risky in ANY newly-converted politician seeking the top office in the land, and that would be true no matter WHAT party he belonged to.
In actual context of his "genius businessman" image, Trump is outdone by more than TEN DOZEN billionaires most people have never heard of whose business success and savvy so outshines Trump's that they are worth 4, 5, and even 20 times MORE than Trump's relatively paltry $3.9 billion.
That's not to knock Trump's success or business savvy. It IS to point out that the ONLY reason Trump is a celebrity is because he is a businessman with a flair for showmanship. He's not famous because of his politics or his business savvy -- he's famous because he set about making himself famous in a Pop Culture kind of way.
So he gets a lot more media attention than a mere actually conservative politician such as Ted Cruz.
Beware, America. Voting for self-promoted pop icons as President, even when they are in the Republican party, is a bad idea.
Except Cruz. He's the "invisible man," to them.
Yeah, the all-conservative, all-the-time approach DOES get a bit tiresome.
Standing up for he he believes is a good thing. Cruz is probably closer to most of us than Trump in terms of his beliefs and proposals. I’m not talking about that. I just think he sometimes can get a bit tangled up on his way to the objective and can lose people along the way.
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.