“Cruz: I’m Not Shady, But The People I Hire Are”: Thou Shalt Not Criticize Another Republican, Unless You Can
It’s hard to run a campaign on the slogan, ‘TrusTED’—as Sen. Ted Cruz is doing—when everyone thinks you’re a dirty trickster.
As allegations of shady behavior continues to erode his image, just one day before the Nevada caucuses, Cruz dismissed a senior staffer who circulated a false news story that questioned fellow GOP candidate Marco Rubio’s faith.
“I had made clear in this campaign that we will conduct this campaign with the very highest standards of integrity,” Cruz said, in making the announcement to a group of reporters in a small meeting room at a YMCA in northern Las Vegas. “That has been how we’ve conducted it from day one.”
This is the latest indication that the Texas senator is concerned about the narrative that has gained strength with each passing state, that far from being trusTED, he is a con artist; a cheater, a liar.
The Cruz campaign has found itself in the middle of a number of controversies, starting from the very first presidential contest in Iowa. The Texas senator’s campaign circulated information that suggested Carson might be leaving the presidential race, drawing the lasting ire of the neurosurgeon.
Even some Cruz’s supporters, who are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, worry about how nasty that campaign has become. Andrew Russell said he thought that circulating information about Ben Carson’s potential dropout on the night of the Iowa caucuses was “a dirty trick.”
“I don’t know if I would point it to Cruz directly, as opposed to his campaign. I saw on Fox News that he fired his communications director today. So I think maybe people on his team have probably gone too far… they’re definitely dirty tricks. I definitely don’t like it, but I’m willing to overlook it,” Russell told The Daily Beast. “This election process in general has become way too negative, way too harsh.”
And other die-hard supporters blamed Cruz’s opponents for dragging the entire presidential campaign into the mud.
“His campaign is positive, because he’s not attacking anybody… Rubio, Carson and Trump all [are] basically lying about him, so I think they’re the ones running a negative campaign,” said Sheila Rhinehart, a Cruz supporter, who called the Iowa caucus incident “unfortunate.”
It’s true that Trump’s opponents have been hammering him for lies and tricks.
Cruz tried to make nice with Ben Carson, who has argued that Cruz’s campaign spread false information about him on the night of the Iowa caucuses. Despite a face-to-face meeting in a large closet in South Carolina, Carson and Cruz did not make amends.
Sen. Marco Rubio told reporters, “It’s every single day, something comes out of the Cruz campaign that’s deceptive and untrue, and in this case goes after my faith…but this is a pattern now and I think we’re now at a point where we start asking about accountability.”
And Donald Trump can’t seem to utter the name “Cruz” without saying the word “liar” immediately afterward.
Still, the Texas Republican has insisted, from the beginning of the campaign, that he would refrain from criticizing other Republicans, frequently citing Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment: ‘Thou shalt not criticize another Republican.’ But the campaign has turned nasty, and he is losing control of his image.
“When other campaigns attack us personally, impugn my integrity or my character, I don’t respond in kind,” insisted Cruz Monday.
So, at a critical point in the presidential contest, Cruz had to dismiss one of the most senior members of his staff.
The most recent incident involved communications director Rick Tyler, who was forced to apologize after posting a story that alleged Rubio telling Cruz’s father that the bible did “[n]ot have many answers” in it. The story included a video with incorrect subtitles—Rubio was in reality praising the bible.
Cruz announced his decision to ask for Tyler’s resignation in a small, nondescript meeting room at a northern Las Vegas YMCA, before taking the stage and delivering his standard stump speech. To his supporters, he made no mention of his dramatic announcement. It was a shock, perhaps even to Tyler himself, who reportedly stormed off the MSNBC set when the news broke, even though he was scheduled to appear on television.
“Rick Tyler’s a good man,” Cruz told the press. “This was a grave error of judgment. It turned out the news story he sent around was false, but I’ll tell you, even if it was true, we are not a campaign that is going to question the faith of another candidate.”
Cruz faces a seminal moment in his campaign Tuesday: a neck-and-neck race with Rubio for second place in the Nevada caucuses, and then a race to a slew of states that will be contested on March 1st, also known as Super Tuesday. If he can’t build trust, Cruz could be obliteraTED.
By: Tim Mak, The Daily Beast, February 22, 2016
“Build Bridges, Not Walls”: It Has Come To This; Donald Trump Vs. The Pope
Donald Trump is aiming ever higher on his list of political enemies. The latest: Pope Francis, who has suggested that Trump is “not Christian” — to which The Donald has responded that Francis will only wish he had been president “if and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS.”
During a phone appearance last week on the Fox Business Network, Trump first responded to the various calls by the leader of Catholic Church for compassion on behalf of Latin American immigrants.
“So I think the pope is a very political person and I think that he doesn’t understand the problems our country has,” Trump said, alleging that the successor to St. Peter was being manipulated. “And I think Mexico got him to do it because Mexico wants to keep the border just the way it is because they’re making a fortune and we’re losing.”
But this Thursday morning, ABC News, a reporter asked the Holy Father if “a good Catholic vote for this man?” as the Holy Father was on a plane back to Rome after his tour of the U.S.-Mexican border.
“Thank God he said I was a politician, because Aristotle defined the human person as ‘animal politicus.’ So at least I am a human person,” responded the esteemed Bishop of Rome. “As to whether I am a pawn — well, maybe, I don’t know. I’ll leave that up to your judgment and that of the people.”
He continued: “And then, a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the gospel. As far as what you said about whether I would advise to vote or not to vote, I am not going to get involved in that. I say only that this man is not Christian if he said things like that. We must see if he said things in that way and in this I give the benefit of the doubt.”
This got Trump pretty fired up, judging from his statement Thursday afternoon:
DONALD J. TRUMP RESPONSE TO THE POPE
If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened. ISIS would have been eradicated unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians.
The Mexican government and its leadership has made many disparaging remarks about me to the Pope, because they want to continue to rip off the United States, both on trade and at the border, and they understand I am totally wise to them. The Pope only heard one side of the story – he didn’t see the crime, the drug trafficking and the negative economic impact the current policies have on the United States. He doesn’t see how Mexican leadership is outsmarting President Obama and our leadership in every aspect of negotiation.
For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian and as President I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President. No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith. They are using the Pope as a pawn and they should be ashamed of themselves for doing so, especially when so many lives are involved and when illegal immigration is so rampant.
Donald J. Trump
Next up: Donald Trump will allege that Pope Francis has a birth certificate in Argentina — and it’s got a different name written on it!
Update:: Trump has now read the statement aloud, at a rally in South Carolina
By: Eric Kleefeld, The National Memo, February 18, 2016
“Clinton: I Will Fight For Flint”: The Children Of Flint Are Just As Precious As The Children Of Any Other Part Of America!
It was around the time that the Rev. Kenneth Stewart said he hoped a woman would be the next president that the faithful at Flint’s House of Prayer Missionary Baptist Church stood and cheered.
Maybe the crowd was more boisterous because the people at the church knew that a possible future president was in the building Sunday morning — Madame Secretary, Stewart called her. But it is difficult to imagine the pastor’s soulful performance as anything but normal for a Baptist church in a town failed by its leaders and virtually forgotten by the country until this recent tragedy struck.
“I don’t know what kind of crisis you are in … but be not dismayed,” he screamed.
There are few words to properly do justice to what Stewart laid down on Sunday morning. It was beyond powerful. It caused him to sweat profusely and run out of breath following a 15-minute rap in which he scoffed at the water crisis troubling this city of nearly 100,000 — what is a lack of clean drinking water compared to the power of God?
It was a tough act for Hillary Clinton to follow.
Originally billed as a “community meeting,” as Stewart’s sermon went on it became clear that Clinton would simply be addressing the congregation from the pastor’s pulpit.
Prepared to tell Flint exactly what it wanted to hear, she performed well.
“The time for action is now.”
“One child with lead poisoning is one child too many.”
“It’s not just the infrastructure, it is a problem for human beings.”
Expand Head Start, and support home nurse programs, more money for special education — “All things that address the problems that lead poisoning can cause.”
Clinton tied in her experience as a senator for New York dealing with lead poisoning there — of the paint chip variety — and she made a promise.
“I will fight for you in Flint no matter how long it takes,” she said, garnering one of the louder applause breaks of her remarks.
With her own sermon stretching on, Clinton was looked on by many in Stewart’s church as a second savior. And without stepping too far into the mannerisms and voice inflections of a black preacher, she was more than willing to play that role.
“If what had happened in Gross Pointe, or Bloomfield Hills,” she said in reference to two mostly white, wealthy communities outside of Detroit, “I think we all know we would have had a solution yesterday.”
“The children of Flint are just as precious as the children of any other part of America!”
And the crowd cheered.
Clinton may have served as Flint’s savior on Sunday, but when she leaves the people here will be on their own again, looking to themselves or the original messiah to watch over them and fix this mess.
But having no safe drinking water is the weakest of challenges for the faithful, Stewart reminded his followers. And if you were in the purple pews of his church on Sunday, damned if you didn’t believe him.
“While you tryin’ to figure it out, God already done worked it out!” he proclaimed.
“If a city’s water supply died, can it live again?” he asked.
The answer is yes, because it is always yes as long as you recognize your lord and savior Jesus Christ. Faith cures all. It absolves sin, redeems the sinner, makes pure the wicked, cures the sick, and provides answers when they are in short supply, according to Stewart. Flint’s leaders failed its people, but what the government can’t do, the church and the community can.
Clearly a committed Clinton supporter, Stewart and many in the crowd believe she can help too.
Clinton, Stewart said, is “The one that we been waitin’ on.”
By: Justine Glawe, The Daily Beast, February 7, 2016
“The G.O.P.’s Holy War”: Righteousness Is A Tricky Business, It Has A Way Of Coming Back To Bite You
In the final, furious days of campaigning here, it was sometimes hard to tell whether this state’s Republicans were poised to vote for a president or a preacher, a commander or a crusader.
The references to religion were expansive. The talk of it was excessive. A few candidates didn’t just profess the supposed purity of their own faith. They questioned rivals’ piety, with Ted Cruz inevitably leading the way.
A rally of his devolved into an inquisition of Donald Trump. Speakers mocked Trump’s occasional claims of devout Christianity. Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, pointedly recalled Trump’s admission last summer that he never really does penance.
Cruz, in contrast, “probably gets up every morning and asks God for forgiveness at least a couple of times, even before breakfast,” Perry told the audience.
The evangelist or the apostate: That’s how the choice was framed. And it underscored the extent to which the Iowa caucuses have turned into an unsettling holy war.
Religion routinely plays a prominent part in political campaigns, especially on the Republican side, and always has an outsize role in Iowa, where evangelical Christians make up an especially large fraction of the Republican electorate.
But there was a particular edge to the discussion this time around. It reflected Trump’s surprising strength among evangelicals and his adversaries’ obvious befuddlement and consternation about that.
Cruz’s whole strategy for capturing the presidency hinges on evangelicals’ support, as Robert Draper details in The Times Magazine.
He rails against abortion rights and same-sex marriage in speeches that sound like sermons, with references to Scripture and invocations of God.
He ended a question-and-answer session with Iowans that I attended in a typical fashion, asking them to use the waning hours until the caucuses to pray.
“Spend just a minute a day saying, ‘Father, God, please,’” he implored them. “Continue this awakening. Continue this spirit of revival. Awaken the body of Christ to pull this country back from the abyss.”
But righteousness is a tricky business. It has a way of coming back to bite you.
A super PAC supporting Mike Huckabee produced an ad for both radio and TV in which two women express doubts about Cruz’s commitment to Christian causes, saying that he speaks in one way to Iowans and in another to New Yorkers whose campaign donations he needs.
“I also heard that Cruz gives less than 1 percent to charity and church,” says one of the two women.
“He doesn’t tithe?” asks the other. “A millionaire that brags about his faith all the time?” They conclude that he’s a phony.
Maybe. Maybe not.
It’s impossible to know the genuineness of someone’s faith. That’s among the reasons we shouldn’t grant it center stage.
Religion was integral to our country’s founding. It’s central to our understanding of the liberty that each of us deserves. But so are the principles that we don’t enshrine any one creed or submit anyone — including those running for office — to religious litmus tests.
So why does a Republican race frequently resemble such an exam?
The winner of the Iowa caucuses in 2012 was Rick Santorum, who put his Catholicism at the forefront of his campaign. The winner in 2008 was Mike Huckabee, a former evangelical pastor who never let you forget that.
To emerge victorious in 2016, several candidates are leaning hard on religion, hoping it’s an advantage over Trump.
But just as God is said to work in mysterious ways, religion is working in unexpected ways in this campaign. According to some national polls, more evangelicals back Trump than they do any other candidate.
That’s true although he’s on his third marriage; although he’s boasted of sexual conquests; although he went to the evangelical stronghold of Liberty University in 2012 and, in a rambling speech, mentioned the importance of prenuptial agreements; although he returned to Liberty University just weeks ago and revealed his inexperience in talking about the Bible by citing “two Corinthians” when anyone with any biblical fluency would have pronounced it “Second Corinthians.”
Liberty’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., went so far as to endorse Trump, a development that clearly galled Trump’s rivals and bolstered their resolve to prove that they’re the better Christians.
Jeb Bush questioned Trump’s faith. Marco Rubio kept going out of his way to extol his own.
He released a television commercial here in which he speaks directly to the camera about what it means to be Christian. “Our goal is eternity, the ability to live alongside our creator for all time,” he says. “The purpose of our life is to cooperate with God’s plan.”
During last week’s debate, he worked religion into an answer to a question that had nothing to do with it. The Fox News anchor Bret Baier had asked him about his electability, mentioning a Time magazine story that called Rubio “the Republican savior.”
“Let me be clear about one thing,” Rubio responded. “There’s only one savior and it’s not me. It’s Jesus Christ, who came down to Earth and died for our sins.”
And at a rally, Rubio visibly brightened when a voter brought up faith and gave him an opportunity to expound on it.
“I pray for wisdom,” he said. “The presidency of the United States is an extraordinary burden and you look at some of the greatest presidents in American history. They were very clear. They were on their knees all the time asking for God, asking God for the wisdom to solve, for the strength to persevere incredible tests.”
That same image came up at the Cruz event during which Perry denigrated Trump. One of the speakers expressed joy at the thought of “a president who’s willing to kneel down and ask God for guidance as he’s leading our country.”
Cruz had declared such willingness in Iowa in November at an evangelical conference where a right-wing pastor talked about the death penalty for gay people and the need for candidates to accept Jesus as the “king of the president of the United States.”
“Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander in chief of this country,” Cruz said then.
I’m less interested in whether a president kneels down than in whether he or she stands up for the important values that many religions teach — altruism, mercy, sacrifice — along with the religious pluralism that this country rightly cherishes. And while I agree that Trump is unfit for the Oval Office, Corinthians has nothing to do with it.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 30, 2016
“Unwrapping Falwell’s Trump Endorsement”: Trump “Reminds Me So Much Of My Father”
On the surface, the political dynamic is baffling. Jerry Falwell Jr., the son of a legendary right-wing TV preacher and the head of one of the nation’s largest evangelical universities, threw his official political support behind Donald Trump – a secular, thrice-married casino owner who’s never really demonstrated any interest in, or knowledge of, matters of faith.
And yet, here we are. Falwell has not only offered a spirited (no pun intended) endorsement to the Republican frontrunner, he’s even gone so far as to say Trump “reminds me so much of my father.”
There’s a fair amount to a story like this one, but let’s start with a blast from the recent past.
In November 2007, another thrice-married New York Republican was running for president, who also had a secular track record of supporting abortion rights and gay rights. And yet, a high-profile televangelist – Christian Coalition president and Christian Broadcasting Network founder Pat Robertson – nevertheless threw his support to that GOP candidate, Rudy Giuliani.
Social conservative activists and leading religious right groups howled, for reasons that are probably obvious. Giuliani was the antithesis of everything evangelicals were looking for in a Republican presidential candidate, and yet, Robertson ignored his allies and threw in his lot with the secular, Catholic adulterer.
Why? Because Robertson’s priorities weren’t (and aren’t) at all similar to those of many other evangelical leaders: the “700 Club” host saw a Republican leading in the polls; he wanted a seat at the table with a man he perceived as a future president; and so Robertson followed the prevailing political winds.
With the benefit of hindsight, we know this was a poor bet – Giuliani failed spectacularly as a candidate, earning exactly zero delegates – but it was a reminder that Robertson is a partisan first and a culture-war ideologue second, while other prominent social conservatives reverse the two.
And Robertson isn’t the only social conservative who thinks this way.
In the current GOP race, prominent political evangelical leaders effectively limited their top choices to five Republican presidential hopefuls: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ben Carson. Trump was an afterthought.
Cruz emerged as the religious right movement’s standard bearer, but like Robertson eight years ago, that didn’t stop Jerry Falwell Jr. from going his own way.
Of course, there’s also the larger question of why Falwell’s fellow evangelicals would even consider Trump in the first place. We can’t say with certainty whether the Liberty University president has partisan or electoral motivations, but that’s a separate question from what other social conservatives are thinking as they, too, rally behind Trump.
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent published a good piece on this last week.
Instead, Trump’s success among evangelical voters may be rooted in the fact that, more than any other GOP candidate, Trump is able to speak to their sense of being under siege. Trump somehow conveys that he understands on a gut level that both Christianity and the country at large are under siege, and what’s more, he is not constrained by politically correct niceties from saying so and proposing drastic measures to reverse this slide into chaos and godlessness.
I recently talked to Robert Jones, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, who has been studying evangelical opinion for many years. His research has led him to believe that Trump is very good at speaking to evangelicals’ sense of a lost, mythical golden age in America that predates the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s.
In other words, we’re talking about a group of voters – largely white, older, social conservatives – who hear Trump vowing to “make America great again,” and believe him, without much regard for his ignorance about religion, his messy personal life, or his previous policy positions.
If a secular, thrice-married casino owner who uses phrases like “Two Corinthians” is eager to champion a vision of a bygone era, these evangelicals appear to care more about the message than the messenger.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 26, 2016
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