I'll go against form, at least for this post.
Cruz has to be all sorts of frustrated. This election should have been his. He had a gameplan that would have worked in almost any other year.
A solid traditional campaign, combining appeal to evangelical voters and the anti-establishment wing of the party, in a year of the outsider. It should have worked.
Win Iowa, finish respectably in New Hampshire. Rebound in South Carolina as a springboard to Super Tuesday. Concede Florida to Rubio or Jeb. Continue the dominance in the plains, pick off a few mid-west states, and it's over.
Instead, he he's played second- or third-fiddle to a hugely popular billionaire who has somehow captured he imagination of the common man while jetting about the country in his private mega-plane, while everyone else is on a bus-tour.
He's been kissing babies, while the other guy is treating children to helicopter rides.
As much as he's not my favorite candidate, and he never was, I can't imagine the puzzlement he's feeling. It has to be hard.
I have almost no concern for the personal puzzlement of Ted Cruz but I do have a enormous concern for the future of the conservative movement in America in the wake of what Donald Trump has done.
Donald Trump has taught every aspiring conservative candidate, every tea party politician newly elected to forsake all his promises and simply go with the flavor of the week. If you stand alone on the floor of the Senate fighting to repeal Obama care you will be denigrated by the same conservatives who rooted for you at the time.
The lesson for conservatives in office, the conservative base is utterly fickle and easily seduced away from principles. How can you reconstitute a conservative movement when you ask elected representatives to stand against the establishment, to stand against the media, knowing that you will sell them out?
