“Religion Won’t Save Cruz’s White House Bid”: Evangelical Appeal Only Takes You So Far
Given that Ted Cruz formally announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in the most overtly religious way possible, pollsters, pundits, and the public will quickly begin to speculate about the role of faith in the 2016 GOP nominating contest.
Unfortunately for Cruz, there is little reason to believe that the Republican Party is going to nominate someone who looks and talks like a televangelist. Yet evangelical elites’ stature within the GOP coalition assures that the party will cater to some—though not all—of their priorities.
Cruz announced his candidacy to a packed convocation at Liberty University. Founded by Jerry Falwell, the famed fundamentalist pastor and political operative who died in 2007, the Lynchburg, Virginia, campus is a bastion of cultural conservatism. The optics of Cruz’s speech, which reporters likened to a sermon, were clearly designed to highlight his evangelical bona fides.
Americans, and especially Republican primary voters, will now take a closer look at Cruz.
Well-known in political circles for his Tea Party-fueled campaign for Senate in 2012, Ted Cruz defied the Beltway expectation that freshmen senators should learn the ropes, quietly deferring to and learning from party elders. Instead, Cruz quickly jumped headlong and uninvited into high-profile political fights, taking it upon himself to help sabotage the Senate’s relationship with the Obama administration and with the House of Representatives.
Never missing an opportunity to grandstand, Cruz has shown that he has the ambition and sense of self-importance to think himself the best person for the job, but only his most ardent supporters could possibly think he seems “presidential.”
Cruz’s path to the GOP nomination (if there is one) centers around one goal: becoming the conservative movement’s alternative to the party establishment’s candidate of choice. Unfortunately for Cruz, it will not work.
With varying degrees of success, GOP presidential aspirants titillate conservative evangelicals with the idea that someone who shares their values could become president. A generation ago, Pat Robertson and Patrick Buchanan gave voice to grassroots longing for rhetoric about faith and values in Republican politics. In 2008, Mike Huckabee won eight states and more than 4 million primary votes before withdrawing in March. A motley crew of characters split evangelicals’ allegiances in 2012. Rick Santorum, a Roman Catholic, received vital evangelical support in winning primaries in six conservative states.
Evangelicals often prefer GOP primary candidates who end up losing the nomination to whoever the party establishment prefers. The nominee ends up being someone the party feels is a safer bet for the general election but whose religious commitment evangelicals greet with private, and sometimes public, skepticism.
Pundits overstate the notion that evangelicals “hold their noses” to vote for candidates like John McCain or Mitt Romney. But it is clear that evangelical leaders harbored doubts about recent GOP nominees’ personal faith and commitments to evangelicals’ core issues.
McCain somewhat overcame his failure to win over evangelicals by adding Sarah Palin to the 2008 ticket. Romney’s Mormon faith was an issue because a majority of evangelicals do not consider Mormons to be Christians.
But McCain’s and Romney’s success ironically points to the reasons for Cruz’s pending failure. Political science research points to the outsized and unseen power of party insiders in presidential nominations. Less scientific but no less true is the oft-made observation that the GOP in particular defers not only to the establishment, but also to whichever candidate has “paid his dues” and seems to be “next in line.”
Cruz has repeatedly defied and alienated the Republican establishment, and no candidate has ever won the nomination without significant support from party insiders.
After the Liberty University speech, a Cruz staffer employed a March Madness metaphor, claiming that the senator is the top seed in the Tea Party bracket and in the evangelical bracket.
Unfortunately for Cruz, whichever candidate wins the establishment bracket will almost certainly win the nomination.
Activating a key GOP constituency like anti-government libertarians or conservative evangelicals is only a viable strategy if it is combined with significant establishment appeal. For this reason, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, and even Rand Paul are better positioned than Ted Cruz.
In previous Republican nominating contests, Cruz’s outspoken evangelical faith could have been a political advantage. But white evangelicals are now so used to working with Catholics on sex-related issues that a candidate’s evangelical identity hardly matters.
This cycle’s GOP nominating contest features a large number of Catholic candidates. Given evangelicals’ primary support for Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum at various points in the 2012 race, Catholic GOP politicians who share evangelicals’ opposition to abortion and concerns about religious liberty should feel secure in their ability to attract and retain evangelicals’ support.
Fears that Ted Cruz would be trounced in November 2016 like “a Republican George McGovern” are vastly overstated. But Ted Cruz’s fervent evangelical faith, however sincere, does nothing to advance his credibility as a contender for the nomination.
By: Jacob Lupfer, The Daily Beast, March 24, 2015
“Don’t Run, Elizabeth Warren, Don’t Run!”: She Just Might Actually Have More Leverage As A Non-Candidate
And so the ratcheting up continues: Now The Boston Globe has weighed in with not one or two or three but four pieces, one of them an in-house editorial, urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president. All right; this is the kind of thing hometown newspapers do, and it gets them attention. And it means that more people will press Warren to take The Globe’s advice when they run into her at the Star Market. But does it really raise the pressure on her in any serious way?
The arguments, by the paper’s editorial board and by contributors Bob Kuttner, Josh Green, and Anna Galland, are reasonable and sound. Warren has a huge following (true). Warren is the Democratic Party’s most articulate and high-profile crusader for the middle and working classes (true). Warren uniquely can pressure Clinton to adopt more populist positions on these issues than she has been associated with in the past (true).
But then come two arguments I find less persuasive, and I write as an admirer of Warren’s. The first is that Warren can have more influence as a candidate than not. The second is that a primary run against an opponent who’s in her political weight class (none of the other Democrats are) will toughen Clinton up in all the good ways. I think there are very good reasons to be less sure about the validity of either of those.
Inside the Democratic Party right now, Warren has as much influence as just about anybody short of the president. She has moral authority. She can move armies. But here’s the next thought in that chain, and it’s important: She can move them without much—or even any—intra-party pushback. The Clinton people know that to throw a brushback pitch at Elizabeth Warren is to risk alienating her millions of followers in a deep way.
But if Warren gets into the race, that hesitation on the part of the Clinton people ends. It would not be a gloves-off, no-holds-barred kind of combat, but combat it would be. The Clinton team would plant negative stories about her. Is there even any real dirt on Elizabeth Warren? Not that anyone knows about, now that she danced her way across Scott Brown’s “fake Cherokee” bed of hot coals. But this is politics. There’s always something. Tim Geithner at least would probably try to supply it. Jim Carville would go on the Sunday shows and start popping off about it. So suddenly, her profile would change: Right now, she’s above the fray; as a candidate, she’d be knee-deep in it, against the Clinton operation.
Even so, Warren would probably win a primary or two, or more, maybe several more. What then? It could actually get kind of ugly in a way that damages both of them. Now I suppose we’ve segued into the second argument, about how a good primary would toughen Clinton up. Maybe. But no one who is writing that sentence today can possibly know for certain that that’s how it would turn out.
People say, “Oh, but look at how the 2008 primary process helped toughen up Obama.” Did it? I’m not so sure. Or if it did, this fabled toughening-up process didn’t have much to do with Clinton. The two biggest crises Obama had to work through during the primary process were entirely self-inflicted: explaining away both a) why he spent all those years in the pews of a pastor who hated America and b) what exactly he meant when he said red-state people cling to guns and religion.
And anyway, Obama did not win the 2008 general election because a long primary season toughened him up. He won for three reasons: America was psychically ready to elect a black man, this particular black man, as its president; the financial meltdown happened on GOP watch; and John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. It had very little, or indeed arguably nothing whatsoever, to do with the primary process.
One could well argue that a long primary fight between her and Clinton would mainly work to the Republicans’ benefit. Especially with the media acting as they inevitably would with two women running against each other—that is, playing up the catfight angle as much as possible, running deep into the ground every cliché from the kingdom of nature about emasculating females.
I have speculated in the past that maybe Warren doesn’t even really want to be president (for foreign policy-related reasons). I also suspect there’s a part of her that doesn’t want to risk doing anything that might end up helping the GOP and allowing the media to indulge its Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford fantasies at the expense of the party.
Finally I suspect Warren knows that she has a tremendous amount of power and leverage as things stand right now. She can sway Clinton’s course plenty as a non-candidate. She doesn’t even have to say or do much. She just needs, every so often, to remind Clinton that she exists, and that her army exists.
So, presidential candidate? She doesn’t need to bother. The things people say she would gain from such a candidacy she in fact has already. However…vice presidential candidate…think about it. Clinton-Warren. I’ve been chewing on this one for months. Mold-shattering. Exactly like what Clinton’s husband did in choosing Al Gore. Precisely the kind of bold play she needs to make to shed her image of caution. Two-thirds of women voters, easy. They’d be a great team on the trail. And imagine that closing-night convention visual. And in office, they could be a great governing team, too.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, my contention is that Warren is at a point of very high leverage as it is, and no one from anywhere inside the Democratic tent wants to lay a glove on her. That would change if she ran. I can understand why her most ardent partisans want her to run—there’s only one gold ring in American politics, and that’s the presidency. But she has been absolutely insistent that she does not want to run. At some point, people ought to accept that she means it. Besides, she’s actually in the catbird’s seat now. She has the power without having to endure the scrutiny. I don’t know many politicians who wouldn’t take that.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 25, 2015
“The Truth Behind Ted Cruz’s Lies”: The Ugly American Approach To Foreign Language In Moral Form
Oh happy day—freshman Texas Senator Ted Cruz is set to announce that he’s running for president. And he’s not going to announce at the Alamo or any other defiant Texas-type monument. He’s making a pilgrimage straight to the birthplace of the Moral Majority, the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University. The setting makes sense for a man who believes that God has called him to politics. After all, the only way to top shutting down the government is to try to run the government into the ground himself.
This month, Cruz released a short video that’s the best evidence yet for what a Cruz presidential campaign might be like. It’s called “A Time for Truth,” and the title has to be intentional irony.
Cruz’s Politifact track record for publicly-asserted falsehoods is the second-highest among front-runners, totaling 56 percent of all statements they’ve looked at. The only other leading contender with a higher rating is Ben Carson, who has a 100 percent “pants on fire” history, the result mainly of his brief time in the national spotlight and only having given Politifact one assertion to check—that people choose to be gay. (The investigative process on verifying that claim could have been entertaining, had Carson taken up Dan Savage’s invitation to take a very personal version of the Pepsi Challenge. Politifact chose a less experiential approach.)
It’s not just Cruz’s habit of embellishment that makes the video’s title more wish-fulfillment than description. One would expect a video entitled “A Time for Truth” to contain, you know, truth. Or calls to speak the truth, at the very least. Cruz’s infomercial, on the other hand, is simply a collection of Cruz clips wherein he apparently confuses speaking the truth with speaking very dramatically and forcefully. It is the Ugly American approach to foreign language in moral form.
Watch as Cruz loudly proclaims he will stand up for various things! He also asks for others to stand up for things! It’s a tic in the vernacular of the evangelical subculture Cruz hails from to think of extravagantly passionate sincerity as evidence of honesty and probity. So perhaps Cruz’s substitution of one for the other is not an intentional bait-and-switch.
Let’s indulge a thought experiment: What if, in all those cases where Cruz’s passionate sincerity has been found to be trustworthy, he meant what he said at the time?
We take it for granted that politicians lie to gain votes, to make themselves more appealing, or to make someone else look bad. But what if Cruz wasn’t craven, but instead as sincere as he sounds. What would that mean?
There are objective falsehoods that show Cruz could just be looking at a different set of data. Other, more telling whoppers show that Cruz isn’t just looking at different data, he’s living in a different universe.
The former category contains his insistence that there’s no such thing as global warming. The latter kind of lie is why Cruz can look a child in the eye and tell her the world is on fire.
Multiple news organizations have found fault with this standard refrain from his stump speech: “There are 110,000 agents at the IRS. We need to put a padlock on that building and take every one of those 110,000 agents and put them on our southern border.” There are not 110,000 agents at the IRS. There aren’t even that many employees. There are about 82,000, of whom about 14,000 are agents.
But that’s just a fact-check of the first sentence; what about the underlying notion that there’s some kind of equivalence between what accountants do and the kind of peacekeeping one might need at the border?
The most generous interpretation might be that Cruz thinks we’re not keeping track of our immigrants; more paperwork is in order. (True enough!) The spookier option is that he thinks IRS agents are as militarized as your local police force, and they would be the group to finally wrest “100 percent operational control” (an Orwellian-sounding metric Cruz often invokes but never explains) in the region.
Cruz’s fantasy life, understandably, gets warmer and fuzzier closer to home. Take his version of the aw-shucks, I-don’t-deserve-her, backhandedly condescending marital anecdote that male candidates are required to have. It casts his decision to run for Senate as a moment of unexpected validation:
He recalled saying to his wife in the weeks before his Senate primary, when he was still behind in the polls, “Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign.”
“What astonished me, then and now, was Heidi within 60 seconds said, ‘Absolutely,’ with no hesitation,” said Mr. Cruz, who invested about $1.2 million—“which is all we had saved,” he added—into his campaign.
Heidi Cruz herself recalls the conversation differently. There was no movie-friendly smash cut “absolutely,” or even assent. Rather, she told Politico, she “wanted him to raise money from elsewhere first, to show that the support was out there.” And even then, “She proposed that they not put their own cash into the campaign unless it made the difference between winning and losing.” That’s sort of the opposite of an instantaneous absolutely: a hesitant and conditional maybe.
Maybe Ted’s version is just the kind of face-saving white lie we tell ourselves to preserve harmony in a relationship. After all, it’s easier and healthier than nursing a grudge. Or, in Cruz’s mind, a hesitant and conditional maybe, if it relates to something he wants bad enough, is enthusiastic agreement.
This delusion would explain almost everything Ted Cruz does.
That would explain Cruz’s misguided belief that a wide swath of Americans want to repeal Obamacare. It would explain his quixotic crusade against the country’s growing support for marriage equality. It would make sense, even, of his run for the presidency.
Cruz, after all, is a “top-tier” candidate mostly in terms of name recognition. While he’s an extremely popular speaker at base-flaming events such as CPAC (where he finished third in the easily gamed Straw Poll), wider swaths of GOP voters are not as kind. Even among the notoriously conservative Republican Iowa caucus-goers he’s in single digits. In the even narrower category of self-identified Iowa Tea Partiers, he has only 10 percent of the vote, trailing Ben Carson (11 percent), Rand Paul (15 percent) and flavor of the month Scott Walker (33 percent).
To be fair, most politicians who run for president have some strain of the megalomania that seems to infect Cruz. Almost every politician who runs for president needs to have that curious mental twist, an ego like a funhouse mirror. Otherwise, no one except those already likely to win would run. Ask some liberal Democrats how they feel about that scenario.
But the most successful politicians seem to leaven self-importance with data. Obama’s 2008 victory over the inevitable Hillary Clinton is often painted in terms of pure marketing, but it was number-crunching that made the difference in the nitty-gritty days of the final states. Bill Clinton often looks like an example of sentiment prevailing over smarts, but his career’s lows reflect the times when he didn’t turn off the charm.
Tell the truth, Ted Cruz says. Just don’t try to get him to be honest with himself.
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Daily Beast, March 22, 2015
“The National Bitch Hunt”: Nothing Ever Changes In Hunt For A Clinton Scandal
Where Hillary Clinton is concerned, nothing ever changes.
The National Bitch Hunt has been going on for more than 20 years. As a personal matter, the inimitable Camille Paglia set the terms in a long ago essay in The New Republic portraying Clinton as a “man-woman…bitch goddess,” and “the drag queen of modern politics.”
Crackpot New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has taken up the theme with a vengeance, writing literally scores of columns depicting the former Secretary of State as a cunning schemer. One week Clinton’s a Stepford Wife, then she’s Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, next Mommie Dearest.
This is what happens when the Heathers at the Cute Girls lunch table suspect you’re smarter than they are. Paglia’s particularly troubled by “the brittle brilliance of Hillary’s calculating, analytical mind.”
I’m betting they’ve never met.
Meanwhile, here’s a Washington Post headline to ponder: “New scandals and reasons to wonder if Hillary is hiding something.”
Quick now: Whitewater, White House Travel Office, or the more contemporary “emailgate”?
It’s Eugene Robinson, March 10, 2015. As the immortal Yogi Berra used to say, déjà vu all over again. The Washington Press Clique’s standard story hasn’t changed for two decades. They can type it up in their sleep. “Washington may now have reached the state-of-the-art point of having a cover-up without a crime,” the Post editorialized back in 1994. By arranging to have Whitewater documents delivered to the Independent Counsel instead of the inept reporters who created the bogus scandal, the White House made “it appear as if the Clintons have something to hide.”
Back then, Time columnist Michael Kramer spoke for them all. Writing entirely in the subjunctive mood — “if,” “may have,” “even if,” “might not” — Kramer confessed he couldn’t make heads or tails of the swirling allegations. Even so, “how is it possible,” he demanded, “that two respected lawyers like Bill and Hillary Clinton don’t possess a paper trail capable of proving their innocence?” [my emphasis]
Many years, millions of dollars and scores of accusatory headlines later, of course, it turned out that they did. Even so, Hillary Clinton’s been living in a Kafka novel ever since. Her guilt is primal, like Original Sin. The “bitch” has to prove her innocence over and over again.
Never mind that no Secretary of State previous to Clinton ever used a government email address. Nor that inadequately protected State Department computers have been repeatedly hacked by Wikileaks and others. Nor even that, contrary to insinuations in the New York Times article that started the latest festival of speculation, the Obama administration law requiring a state.gov address wasn’t enacted until two years after Clinton left the State Department.
People expecting bombshell revelations must think that Clinton’s not only a cunning Machiavel scheming her way into the White House, but also as dumb as a box of rocks. Whatever you think of her politics, realistically, what do you think are the odds that somebody with her unique experiences connived to hide her torrid love affair with Vladimir Putin or her secret membership in the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Muslim Brotherhood, and wrote it all down in an email?
Again, love her or don’t, but here’s the thing about Hillary Clinton: Paglia’s right, she’s seriously smart, diligent, and she always does her homework. Certainly smart enough to understand Rule One of cyber communications: If you don’t want to see it in the newspaper or on Fox News, don’t text it, tweet it, put it on Facebook or send it in an email.
During her March 10 press conference, Clinton casually allowed as how she never sent or received classified information via email. That alone should dampen the enthusiasm of Republicans on the latest House Benghazi committee who leaked this overblown story to the media in the first place. Indeed that appears to be their motive. Evidence of the cover-up conspiracy theorists have imagined turns out to be entirely lacking.
“We knew as of last summer that the Secretary used a private email account,” said California Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff. “This is not something new. We knew also that she was cooperating. She was giving us everything that we asked for. Nothing changed except for the pressure on the Republican members of the committee this week became too great for them to resist from the Stop Hillary PAC people and the RNC people, so they issued a subpoena for records that we already have.
“Now, the Secretary has called for those records to be made public. Why isn’t the chairman doing that? Why aren’t we doing that? The reason is we’ve read them. There’s nothing in them. My colleague says well, how do we know we have them all?”
How, indeed? That too has been an unvarying feature of the National Bitch Hunt. The incriminating evidence remains forever over the event horizon, and tantalizingly just out of reach.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, March 11, 2015
“Clinton; Not A Scandal, Yet. But…”: The Right Is Going To Be Gunning For Her From Day One
So by now we’ve read every possible interpretation of why Hillary Clinton used a personal email account to conduct her State Department business. There’s a lot that isn’t clear, and a lot we still don’t know. The main thing we know that is the original Times story that broke the news was really slipshod, staggeringly so for such a major story in America’s best newspaper. After I and others noted this, you could tell the Times acknowledged as much, because the paper’s Day Two follow-up didn’t really have any new news, just facts and dates that should have been in the original article to begin with. It took reporters the better part of the day Tuesday to figure out exactly which regulation the Times piece was accusing Clinton of potentially violating.
Even Mark Halperin, nobody’s idea of a Clintonista, slammed the original article. “There are things in the Times story that if they’re not flat out wrong are really misleading and unfair to the Clintons,” he said on Bloomberg TV.
The Times’ overheated sloppiness does not mean, however, that Clinton is totally in the clear here. I didn’t say that (“Clinton still has some questions to answer,” I wrote Tuesday). The citizens on whose behalf she was conducting business obviously have the right to hear her explain why she opted to use a private account. And we have the right to know whether the private server was more secure than State’s or less, and whether any classified information was electronically transported across this server. (You may think it implausible that a private server could have been more secure than State’s, but remember, Wikileaks didn’t seem to find the State systems too impenetrable, and it is after all the federal government we’re talking about.)
If the answers to any of these questions turns out to be alarming, this could become a legitimate scandal. And of course, depending on the content of the emails, we may well be in for another, related Clinton “scandal.” She doesn’t have to have said anything self-incriminating in these emails. The way the other side is out to get her, one ill-considered verb could end up being hung around her neck for days or weeks.
But even if this story were to end right here, or right after she does a press conference about it, there are a couple of lessons Clinton ought to take away from this.
First, she desperately needs someone on her staff to serve as a kind of average person-common sense barometer, and this person has to have the stature to be able to give it to her straight, and she has to listen to this person. In this case, back in early 2009, this person might have said something like, “I don’t know, Hillary. When an average person gets a job at First Federal Bank, he gets a First Federal email address, and that’s the account through which he conducts his banking business. Anything other than that is just gonna look weird to people.”
Or, last year, on the topic of her paid public appearances: “No, Hillary, not Goldman Sachs. Avocado growers, I see no harm. American Association of Sheetrock Manufacturers? Fine, if you insist. But not Goldman!”
Or: “You know, maybe it’s not the world’s best idea for you to put your name on that foundation. Cuz then whenever a question arises about its funding sources you can say ‘Hey, it’s his foundation, not mine!’”
Or, more proactively: “I was thinking, Hillary, with all these millions you’ve now made, and coming out of State, why not start your own foundation? Help women around the world with microcredit and all that. Can’t lose.”
Yes, she ought to be able to make these calls herself, but it seems clear that she can’t. They’re obviously not Bill’s strong suit either. So since neither of them seems able to do it, they need to hire some help. Or maybe assemble a panel of actual average Americans, and when one of these decisions looms, her staff can video-tape the panel reacting, and she can watch.
The second thing she needs to get is this: If she does become president, the right is going to be gunning for her from Day One, sniffing around for impeachable offenses from the second she takes the oath. This kind of secrecy and defensiveness will only add fuel to the fire—and it will put the media on the right’s side. It will make it look—not just to Hillary-haters, but to average people—like she’s hiding something even when she doesn’t have anything she needs to hide. We’ve seen that movie many times.
If she’s president, she has to break that habit. The White House operates under far more onerous disclosure and accountability rules than the cabinet departments do, and if she doesn’t follow those rules and then some, she’s just going be handing those out to get her the proverbial match.
Old habits die hard as they say. We seemed to have reason to think that the Hillary Clinton who urged the stonewalling of The Washington Post on Whitewater documents back in 1994 had gone away. We never heard any such stories in her Senate or State years until now. But that Hillary is still around, apparently. The Tweet she sent out late Wednesday night doesn’t quite equate to transparency.
The other old habits that won’t die easily are 1) right-wing loathing of her and desire to discredit and even destroy her, and 2) the mainstream media’s reflexive, uncritical, and panting promotion of every charge the right levels against her (remember, though this story came through the Times, it obviously originated in Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee’s investigative staff). Clinton’s old habit just feeds these others, and it’s not a dynamic she or the country will need if she’s in the White House.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 6, 2015
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