One of the most conservative members of the Senate, Cruz would test the argument made by leaders of the hard right that Republicans have lost four of the last six presidential elections because their candidates — George H. W. Bush of 1992, Robert Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney — were insufficiently conservative.
.. Cruz’s nomination would turn the general election in November into an almost perfect test of the viability of a pure conservative.
.. He subscribes to the belief that life begins at fertilization. This position would not only criminalize abortions in the case of rape and incest but would prohibit the use of contraceptive methods that are understood to prevent the uterine implantation of a fertilized egg like the intrauterine device and the morning-after pill.
.. What is really stunning to a longtime observer of Washington is the number of reputable people who have brutally criticized Cruz on the record. The New Republic recently published an extraordinary collection of anti-Cruz quotes that runs from the left through the center to the right. His colleagues are on record as hating him — hate may be too mild a description. First and foremost, he has angered virtually everyone he works with, especially his fellow Republican senators.
.. John Feehery, president of Quinn Gillespie Communications, and a former top Republican staffer on Capitol Hill, was more outspoken:
Cruz is an army of one, alienating anybody who is in his path. He advocates losing strategies purely to further his own career at the expense of the party.
.. Cruz, more than any of the other Republican presidential candidates, including Trump, is ideally suited to mobilize every Democratic constituency, including single women, minorities, young voters and socially liberal professionals
.. Married white Christians have steadily dropped from 80 percent of voters in the late 1950s to fewer than 40 percent now. In 1940, 82 percent of adults were members of the white working class; now that number is well below 30 percent.
.. if Cruz were nominated, party leaders would “sit down and try to help Cruz run a better campaign, but he may not listen.” In contrast, “You can coach Donald,” Black said.
Iowa, Ted Cruz, and the Evangelical Identity Crisis
Because “Hey! Good News! We just carpet bombed the hell out of you,” sounds a lot more like the gods of ancient Rome than the God of Jesus Christ.
The Many Frenemies of Ted Cruz
The strategist then checked off the various other presidential candidates who, at one time or another, had briefly allied themselves with Cruz for their own strategic gain. Early in the debates, Jeb Bush’s viability required that his fellow Floridian Marco Rubio be wounded. Cruz obliged Bush bychiding Rubio for his support of the Gang of Eight immigration bill. Rubio, in turn, needed Donald Trump to lose altitude in Iowa in order for him to gain any. Cruz thus did Rubio a solid with his attacks on Trump’s sketchy allegiance to the Republican Party.
Governors Bush, Chris Christie and John Kasich all needed a strong showing in New Hampshire in order to survive, and thus needed someone to deny Trump the momentum that a victory in Iowa might provide. Cruz was only too happy to help. Then, on the eve of the Feb. 6 debate hosted by ABC News, he argued that Carly Fiorina deserved a spot on the debate stage despite her low standing in the polls — a move that allowed him to look magnanimous toward a lagging challenger while also serving his own interests (because Fiorina’s speechifying would mean less time for others to be taking shots at Cruz).
.. “Then, two weeks before the general election, when we’re looking to appeal to swing voters, he tried to come into Iowa in a very crass maneuver. To a person, no one on the campaign thought that having Mr. Government Shutdown two weeks before the election was going to help anyone other than Ted Cruz. So we said no thanks.”
.. To some degree, the suggestion that Cruz is singularly off-putting is unfair. He does not have a reputation as a cold and abusive boss like some of his colleagues in the Capitol. Nor, as a candidate, is he prone to tantrums or divaesque demands (beyond not wanting a packed morning schedule).
Though Cruz is an infrequent and numbingly scripted interviewee, he is as polite to reporters one on one as he is contemptuous of them in his stump speech.
.. Trump’s schoolyard invective puts himself in a class of his own, of course. Christie and Kasich can be foul-tempered to subordinates, political colleagues and the public alike.
Ted Cruz, Hometown Anti-Hero
The fact that he and his wife, Heidi, and their two young daughters live in a luxury high rise seems telling in that just-passing-through way.