“Give Me Lipitor Or Give Me Death”: Last Call; Ted Cruz Signs Up For Obamacare
A day after announcing his White House bid – which included beating on the Affordable Care Act, his favorite punching bag – Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, says he’s signing up for Obamacare.
Yes, you read that correctly: The man whose signature applause line is a promise to “repeal each and every word of Obamacare,” went on Healthcare.gov and got himself some benefits. Hypocrisy? Sure, but not in the way you might think.
Cruz had been covered through his wife’s employer, Goldman Sachs. If some insurance plans are Cadillacs, hers was a chauffeured, solid-gold Fleetwood, reportedly worth some $20,000 a year — around half of Texas’ median income. Heidi Cruz is taking a year or so of unpaid leave to help him on his campaign, though, so her health care coverage evaporates along with her likely very substantial paycheck.
Now, the senator – or maybe an aide, or an intern or campaign volunteer or someone – will schlep to the computer, log on to Healthcare.gov and hunch down over the keyboard to do the Obamacare two-step to get coverage for the upcoming year.
Cruz says he had to get health coverage Obamacare, and he’s right: Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, inserted an ACA amendment that requires all members of Congress to sign up through the federal exchange. That means Cruz has to if he wants health insurance, although, unlike a lot of Obamacare enrollees, his $174,000 annual Senate salary covers the premiums.
“Well, it is written in the law that members will be on the exchanges without subsidies just like millions of Americans so that’s – I think the same rules should apply to all of us,” Cruz told the Des Moines Register. “Members of Congress should not be exempt.”
Cruz has come up with his own Obamacare alternative, a plan which shifts a lot of control to the states — including ones like Texas, that opted out of Obamacare and all that federal money that went with it. If it were available, he probably would have signed up for Cruzcare instead.
Cruz: 2, Hypocrisy: Undecided. Still, let’s take a closer look.
If Cruz wanted to stand on no-Obamacare, no-way principle, however, perhaps he could opt out of government-sponsored health care entirely, just like the 6.3 million Texans who don’t have health insurance — in part because his state, and his party, decided to block it. That includes 1.2 million children just like Cruz’s two little girls who can’t get health care if they get sick.
That’s made Texas the state with the highest number of uninsured people, nearly twice the national average.
Further, if you squint, the changes the Cruz family are undergoing — loss of a job or a dramatic life change that reduces income — are the top reasons people lose health insurance, and among the reasons Obamacare exists in the first place. And if a parent or spouse gets sick without insurance, it can lead to some serious financial hardship.
It’s perhaps safe to say Cruz understands that intuitively, even if he probably would never say so explicitly. Which is probably why he signed up, and where the hypocrisy comes in.
Even though it exposes him to a modicum of ridicule, allegations of hypocrisy and getting the stink-eye from some of his die-hard supporters, Ted’s Excellent Obamacare Adventure speaks more loudly than his “repeal every word of Obamacare” applause line. When it came down to brass tacks and he lost his wife’s coverage, he opted-in.
He may be a fierce Obamacare critic, and he may agree with the decision to deny affordable health insurance to more than 6 million Texans who, one imagines, he assumes would rather have liberty than Lipitor. But when it becomes a personal matter involving his own family, his conservative ideals don’t necessarily apply.
By: Joseph P. Williams, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, march 24, 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
“Ted Cruz Cannot Be Serious”: With Ill-Conceived Fantasies, Cruz Is Entirely Unsuited To Be President
The big news of the day is that Senator Ted Cruz is officially running for president. Not setting up an exploratory committee or any of that perfunctory foreplay, but actually running. “It is a time for truth. It is a time for liberty,” he said in a 30-minute speech at, yeah, Liberty University. “It is a time to reclaim the Constitution of the United States.” Cruz’s address was full of red meat for the conservative crowd. But other than his oratorical skills, Cruz is entirely unsuited to be president. Luckily for America, his candidacy is likely doomed to fizzle.
Cruz recapped his life story, focusing on the role faith plays in his life, before diving into his traditional conservative talking points. He asked the crowd to imagine “millions of young people coming together and standing together, saying, ‘We will stand for liberty'” and “instead of economic stagnation, booming economic growth.” He asked people to imagine the next president repealing Obamacare, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, implementing a flat tax and “finally, finally, finally secur[ing] the borders.” The crowd cheered each time.
The rest of the Republican field, whenever they officially announce their candidacies, will probably make similar promises; it’s hard to picture a candidate winning the Republican nomination without vowing to repeal Obamacare. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent writes, the Republican primary will reveal whether Cruz’s policy positions are extreme within the GOP or whether he differs mainly in his tactics.
His positions, regardless of where they fall within the Republican Party, are ill-conceived fantasies. Take taxes. A flat tax may appeal to the conservative base but it entirely misrepresents the actual problems with the U.S. tax code. The tax code is complicated not because of its progressive structure but because it is full of deductions, exemptions and credits that make it hard to calculate your taxable income. Cruz promotes the flat tax by saying it “lets every American fill out his or her taxes on a postcard.” But the exact same could be said about a progressive tax system. Senator Marco Rubio, another presumptive presidential candidate, didn’t propose a flat tax in his recently released tax plan (although he did say he wants to get there someday) because doing so is just not feasible. A flat tax would need to be set at a high enough level to fund critical government programs, requiring a massive tax increase on the middle class and poor. That’d be a political nightmare.
On Obamacare, Cruz wants to repeal the law … and then basically see what happens. This is, of course, the Republican Party’s position as well. But it’s unacceptable as a presidential candidate’s health care agenda. If you want to repeal the health care law, you better have a replacement plan. The same goes with abolishing the IRS. A Cruz government would eliminate the agency but it would still collect taxes—somehow. Cruz has never said how that would work. Would there be a new agency to replace the IRS? Would it have employees? Who, after all, would collect all those postcards? All unanswered questions.
Yet above all, one particular position should disqualify Cruz—or anyone else who holds it—from the presidency: using the debt ceiling as a hostage device. Breaching the debt ceiling would be disastrous. It’s hard to forecast exactly what would happen, but we can somewhat forecast day one after default. The government would have to prioritize its payments. Do you withhold food stamps from low-income Americans? Delay Social Security checks? Maybe we should stop payments on infrastructure projects. Those missed payments would harm millions of Americans and cause mass disruptions around the country as cash flow problems cause companies to become insolvent. Over the long term, it would permanently raise our borrowing costs, making our interest payments more expensive. In short, it would be self-inflicted economic Armageddon. Cruz considers his willingness to risk that catastrophe a selling point, touting his role in opposing the debt ceiling hikes on his website.
Beyond his policy positions, Cruz has demonstrated himself to be particularly un-presidential. During the 2013 government shutdown, for one, he demanded that President Barack Obama defund Obamacare in return for keeping the government open and avoiding a default on the national debt. It was a ridiculous demand that elevated Cruz’s national profile and ended with Republican approval ratings cratering. In the process, he infuriated much of the Republican establishment—not the only time he has done that.
That episode wasn’t an outlier. Throughout his time in the Senate, Cruz has shown a distinct lack of interest in policymaking or governing. Instead, he has calculated every move to prepare for a 2016 run. Every politician considers the optics of their positions, of course, but Cruz has taken it to the next level, with little care for how his actions affected the Republican Party or his colleagues. In doing so, he probably doomed his candidacy. On Monday, Five Thirty Eight’s Harry Enten convincingly argued that Cruz’s extreme views and his few friends within the Republican Party make it highly unlikely that he will win the nomination.
And that means Cruz’s role in the Republican primary will likely benefit Democrats. He’ll pull the rest of the party to the right on immigration, taxes and health care. Moderates such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush may have to resist the urge to adopt more conservative positions. In December, for instance, Bush said that the GOP candidates had to be willing to “lose the primary to win the general without violating your principles.” But that position is easy to hold 23 months before the general election and more than a year before the first primary. It will become harder to sustain as Cruz and others repeatedly hammer the moderates.
In Cruz’s speech Monday, he never mentioned Hillary Clinton. Instead, he painted a bleak picture of America and its role in the world, saying that the American dream “is slipping away from our hands.” He sees a desperate need for a conservative president to “restore that shining city on a hill that is the United States of America.” Implied throughout: Democrats are ruining America. Yet his actions are only making a Hillary Clinton presidency more likely. The Senator who would hold the government hostage has become the candidate doing the same to his party.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, March 23, 2015
“Cruz Tells Small Child, ‘Your World Is On Fire'”: Scare Them While They’re Young And You’ll Have Them For Life
For politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), fear is an important motivating tool. Listen to the far-right Texan deliver a typical stump speech and you’ll hear quite a few dire assessments from Cruz about nearly everything.
But as a rule, when politicians address small children, they dial it down a notch. It made a Cruz event in New Hampshire the other day that much more noteworthy.
[Cruz said,] “The Obama economy is a disaster. Obamacare is a train wreck. And the Obama-Clinton foreign policy of leading from behind – the whole world’s on fire!”
Julie Trant, a child in the audience, took this literally. “The world’s on fire?” she asked.
“The world is on fire, yes,” said Cruz, not missing a beat as the crowd chuckled. “Your world is on fire.”
Let’s note that the child in this story is just three years old. During the event, she was sitting on her mother’s lap.
Cruz quickly added, however, “But you know what? Your mommy’s here, and everyone’s here to make sure that the world you grow up in is even better.”
Let’s unpack this one:
- The “Obama economy,” in reality, is not a disaster. On the contrary, the president’s economic agenda ended the Great Recession, turned the economy around, and created the strongest job growth since the 1990s.
- The Affordable Care Act is not “a train wreck.” On the contrary, the ACA is actually succeeding beautifully, exceeding the expectations of many optimists.
- The whole world is not “on fire,” at least not any more than usual.
- Telling a three-year-old child, “Your world is on fire” is probably inappropriate at any time, but it’s especially unsettling when it’s wrong.
- Telling that same child that Republicans are going to “make sure that the world you grow up in is even better” is odd phrasing. “Even better” usually follows “things are good,” not “things are horrible.”
The child’s mother, for what it’s worth, describes herself as “a huge Ted Cruz supporter” and said during a radio interview this morning that she describes the senator as “Uncle Cruz” to her daughter.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, March 16, 2015
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