“Ted Cruz, Christian Warrior Supreme”: Hell-Bent On Outhustling Everybody For Allegiance Of Evangelical Crackro-Americans
Even as we learn that on at least one occasion the scion of the Ultimate WASP Family, Jeb Bush, identified himself as “Hispanic,” an actual Hispanic proto-candidate for president, Ted Cruz, seems hell-bent on outhustling everybody for the allegiance of conservative evangelical Crackro-Americans. Per a report from Politico‘s Alex Isenstadt, Cruz ran the first campaign ads of the cycle over Eastern Weekend on programs (especially the latest biblical docum-drama, A.D. The Bible Continues, which premiered last night) with special appeal to Cruz’s fellow Southern Baptists. Cruz’s staff was very open with Isenstadt about their candidate’s dedication to Bible-thumping:
Ted Cruz’s aggressive pursuit of the evangelical vote began with a deliberate choice of venue for his presidential announcement two weeks ago: Liberty University, which bills itself as the largest Christian university in the world.
The Texas Republican senator’s strategic play for Christian conservatives comes into even sharper focus this weekend as he rolls out the first television ad of the 2016 race. Titled “Blessing,” the commercial is aimed directly at evangelical and social conservative voters in early voting states, timed for Easter weekend and slated to air during popular Christian-themed programming.
It’s an exercise in narrowcasting that telegraphs exactly how Cruz intends to win the GOP nomination against better-funded and better-known rivals. His advisers say the Liberty University backdrop, the TV ads and even his recent two-day tour of Iowa are all part of a detailed blueprint designed to tap into the power of two distinct GOP wings — evangelicals and the tea party movement.
Since probably about 80% of these two “wings” overlap, it’s an even narrower casting than Isenstadt’s account indicates. But there’s no question the Texan doesn’t have the luxury of being able to rely on any subtle dog-whistling. Mike Huckabee, after all, is an ordained Southern Baptist minister who’s been working this particular audience for eight years. Rick Perry has deep Christian Right roots. Rick Santorum is an accomplished veteran of the campaign to build counter-cultural ties between conservative evangelicals and “traditionalist” Catholics. And Bobby Jindal’s tongue has been lolling out for about a year now in his relentless pursuit of the mantle of the Christian Right’s very best friend.
So Ted’s got to just come right out and say things others may just imply. One indicator of how it’s going may well be the extent to which he deploys the powerful but perilous weapon of his deranged father, the Rev. Rafael Cruz. In “Blessing,” he plays the bit role of a drunken would-be deadbeat dad saved by Jesus. If Rafael starts speaking in his son’s ads, Ted’s campaign to become the Christian Warrior Supreme is either going really well or really badly.
By: Ed Kligore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, April 6, 2015
“Imagine Cruz As President”: You Can’t Stand In A Hog Wallow Without Getting Stink All Over You
And away we go — off on another crazy cruze with Ted!
Cinch up your seatbelts, for Senator Ted Cruz (fueled by his raw ambition and flaming jet-powered ego) has come screeching out of the GOP’s presidential staging area, getting a head start on all the other wannabes seeking the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. And what a crazy start Ted made, launching his campaign from Liberty University. Liberty U is the creation of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, the self-promoting Christian theocrat, bigot, liar, and buffoonish pretender to be God’s chosen agent on Earth. Cruz hopes that launching there will make him “God’s candidate” — the chosen one of far-right Christian extremists who dominate the vote in the early Republican contests.
But, good Lord — Falwell? The vast majority of Americans remember him as an unholy fool, a non-stop spewer of hate. “I listen to feminists and all these radical gals,” he said. “These women just need a man in the house. That’s all they need. A man to tell them what time of day it is.” And who can forget this piece of vicious sermonizing: “AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals”? Likewise, the pompous preacher said 9/11 was “what we deserve,” claiming it was God’s punishment for feminism, gays, the ACLU and other evils. His knowledge of African-Americans was equally insightful: “The true Negro does not want integration,” he explained.
Also, in Jerry’s world: “There is no separation of church and state”; “all public schools will be closed and taken over by churches,” and “Christians will be running them”; and the Bible is “absolutely infallible,” even “in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.”
You can’t stand in a hog wallow without getting stink all over you. Yet, Crazy Ted Cruz deliberately chose to stand in Falwell’s political wallow, which leaves him reeking with the stench of Falwell’s nastiness and know-nothingism. Is Cruz running to be president of the USA — or of Liberty University?
Ted’s announcement of his presidential candidacy was a real Cruz-a-palooza! It was part Ronald Reagan, part Elmer Gantry, part John Lennon and, of course, part Jerry Falwell — yet it was totally Ted Cruz — full of blather, bloat and BS.
Not only was it staged at Liberty U but Cruz thumped the word “liberty” again and again, like a televangelist thumping the Bible. “We stand together for liberty,” the candidate declared one final time at the conclusion of the show. That was more than a little cynical. While the mass media reported that Cruz drew a packed house of 10,000 Liberty students, few news stories mentioned a pertinent fact about the crowd — the budding scholars were not at… liberty to avoid his speech, for school officials made attendance mandatory.
Another word reprised throughout the campaign event was “imagine” — used 38 times by Cruz in a sort of dreamy imitation of the John Lennon song. “Imagine health care reform that keeps government out of the way,” warbled the senator, whose family has received free, platinum-level coverage from Goldman Sachs, where his wife was a top executive. But she has now taken a leave from the Wall Street giant to join Ted’s anti-government crusade, so suddenly they had no health coverage. No problem for a hypocrite like Cruz, though — only a day after the big speech, he said he plans to sign up for Obamacare, the very program he demonized and pledged to kill.
But it was in the speech’s finale that Ted reached his crescendo of cynicism: “It is a time for truth,” he bellowed. Truth? This is a guy who fabricates facts to foment fear among the fringiest of the farthermost fringe of the right wingers. The good news is that the more he campaigns, the more obvious it will be that can’t even imagine truth. And like Falwell, he will be another fool for the history books.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, April 1, 2015
“Long On Facade, Short On Bricks And Mortar”: Will The Ted Cruz Presidential Campaign Be All Hat, No Cattle?
A presidential campaign often poses the largest, toughest management challenge of a candidate’s life to date, and fairly or not, is often considered a proxy for whether a politician has what it takes to lead a country.
In order to be the first 2016 candidate to officially launch, Texas senator Ted Cruz skimped on a few hallmarks of a fully prepared, well-run campaign. He used stock footage of American landmarks in a midnight announcement video. He announced in a prefabricated setting before an attendance-required crowd at Liberty University. And his post-announcement tour was actually a media blitz that included Fox News, NBC, CBS, The Laura Ingraham Show and The Glenn Beck Radio Program.
Kentucky senator Rand Paul, by contrast, plans to enter the race April 7 in Louisville and spend the next four days at rallies and other events in the crucial early voting states of New Hampshire, South Carolina, Iowa and Nevada. Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are laying even more extensive groundwork.
Cruz’s choice of an evangelical Christian university for his Monday announcement certainly reinforced his identity as a religious conservative. But it also raised inauspicious questions. Start with the fact that had he not slated his event for that day in that place, the 12,000 students Cruz described as “on fire” would have been listening (albeit perhaps less enthusiastically) to Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe. A leading Democrat and Clinton family ally, he was the speaker originally scheduled for that slot.
Could Cruz have gotten his own crowd, one that did not show up under threat of university penalties, and that did not feature people wearing Rand Paul T-shirts? Does Cruz have infrastructure in early primary states? Can he raise sufficient money? In short, will the campaign be real? Or will it be an extension of Cruz’s Senate persona as a champion talker, more interested in making a point than moving the ball?
There have been many candidates who say they are running for president and even are included in primary-season debates. But their campaigns are Potemkin villages — long on facade, short on bricks and mortar.
Cruz would argue that he is all about substance. He bristled during several interviews when it was noted that both he and Obama chose to run for president at the same early point in their Senate careers. Cruz rightly pointed out that he spent more than five years as solicitor general of Texas and won big victories before the Supreme Court. “Unlike Barack Obama, I wasn’t a community organizer,” he said.
Obama was indeed a community organizer — after college for three years, two of them as director of the program. He then went to Harvard Law School, practiced law, taught law, and spent eight years in the Illinois Senate, where he was a leader in improving ethics and transparency, health and tax programs for the poor, and police practices affecting minorities.
As for the U.S. Senate, Cruz repeatedly called Obama an inconsequential backbencher. By contrast, Cruz said, he has personally led fights to uphold conservative principles “on issue after issue after issue,” including stopping Obamacare and stopping “amnesty” for immigrants in the country illegally.
Obama might well have made fewer headlines than Cruz in the U.S. Senate. He did, however, play a key role in the passage of laws and sections of laws on ethics, transparency, green energy, protecting veterans, securing nuclear materials, and prohibiting no-bid contracting in the aftermath of disasters. The fights Cruz led against Obama’s health and immigration policies, meanwhile, produced one government shutdown, one near-shutdown, and sinking GOP approval ratings. The policies he fought are still in effect.
Clearly, leading a fight is not the same as winning a fight. Winning in Congress often means laboring and sometimes compromising in obscurity — all to get your bill or provision or amendment wrapped into a huge piece of legislation with someone else’s name on it.
In his focus on battles as opposed to results, Cruz recalls former Rep. Michele Bachmann. Voters want “a fighter against the political establishment of Washington, D.C., and I have credentials there,” the Minnesota Republican said four years ago on Fox News, as she was gearing up for a 2012 presidential bid. She did express a lot of fighting views. But when she retired from Congress, her legislative record was characterized as thin.
Cruz raised a half-million dollars on his first official day as a candidate, a good start. Among his tests is whether he can sustain that pace and build a full-fledged campaign. To call on a cowboy cliché, Cruz has a lot of ground to make up if he wants to show he is not all hat, no cattle.
By: Jill Lawrence, The National Memo, March 26, 2015
“Image Conflicting With His Actual Personality”: The Real Ted Cruz; Country Music, Harvard Law, And Tea Party ‘Populism’
Nobody who knows Ted Cruz — the Texas freshman senator who became the first official contestant for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination this week – doubts that he is very, very smart. That includes Cruz himself, whose emphatic confidence in his own superior intelligence has not always endeared him to colleagues and acquaintances (whose opinions of his personality are often profanely negative).
Yet while Cruz cleverly seeks to highlight the Tea Party persona that appeals to many Republican primary voters, he exposes the fraudulence of his ultra-right brand of “populism.”
Cruz announced his candidacy at Liberty University, a religious-right institution founded by the late Jerry Falwell. No doubt he chose the misnamed Liberty to underscore his commitment to the political attitudes – “anti-elitist” and often opposed to scientific and intellectual inquiry – that the late reverend represented. To Falwell, secular education and the Enlightenment tradition of free thought always seemed suspiciously irreligious; at Liberty, creationism is a required course, the Young Democrats are outlawed, and both students and faculty are rigorously censored.
What could someone like Ted Cruz, a vocal advocate of First Amendment rights, honestly think about a place like Liberty? Falwell’s school languishes far below the standards of educational achievement – including an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School — that have always filled Cruz with pride. Sometimes with excessive pride, like when he reportedly told Harvard Law classmates that he intended to form a study group including only those who had attended Harvard, Yale, or Princeton as undergrads.
Josh Marshall, a journalist who attended college with Cruz, noted in Talking Points Memo that this bit of academic snobbery marked the future senator as a “pompous a**hole” at Harvard Law, “an amazing accomplishment since the competition there for that description is intense [his emphasis].”
In a further attempt to portray himself as a right-wing populist, Cruz now claims to be a country music fan – having changed preferences after 9/11, when he abandoned “classic rock” for country, which he suggested is more patriotic:
“My music tastes changed on 9/11. I actually intellectually find this very curious, but on 9/11, I didn’t like how rock music responded. And country music — collectively — the way they responded, it resonated with me. And I have to say just at a gut level, I had an emotional reaction that says, ‘These are my people. And ever since 2001, I listen to country music,” he told CBS News – without naming a single country artist or band.
Now every presidential candidate carefully cultivates a public personality by promoting and even adopting tastes that might resonate with desired constituencies. But there are few politicians whose image conflicts so sharply with his actual personality and real base of support.
Analyzing the Texan’s financial base as he entered the presidential arena, Bloomberg News revealed “surprising weakness when it comes to small donors.” Only 16 percent of Cruz donors gave less than $200, compared with 43 percent of the donors to his fellow Tea Party favorite Rand Paul. The funding that propelled him into the Senate came from groups like the billionaire-backed Club for Growth and the Washington-based Tea Party organizations underwritten by the Koch brothers with their oil billions. Having attended the same elite schools, the people writing those big checks must feel quite comfortable with Cruz.
Need anyone be reminded of the policies favored by such interests? They oppose raising the minimum wage, or even the existence of a minimum wage. They would gut Medicare, Social Security, and unemployment benefits, along with every other government program that supports the middle class. They would reduce their own taxes even more, while raising taxes on working families – all retrogressive ideas that even the average Republican rejects.
If that’s populism, Ted Cruz is truly a man of the people.
By: Joe Conason, Editor at Large, Featured Post, Editor’s Blog; The National Memo, March 27, 2015
“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
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