In Iowa, Whispers of an Anti-Cruz (and Pro-Rubio) Alliance

Many supporters of Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, the last two winners of Iowa’s Republican presidential contests, are grappling with a pair of grim realities as the 2016 caucuses approach. Not only have their candidates been stuck in the low single digits for months in Iowa, but they also view Cruz, the new front-runner, as a phony opportunist who has pandered to Evangelicals for political gain, particularly in Iowa.

.. At the heart of these amorphous efforts is an agreement among supporters of both Huckabee and Santorum that if their candidate can’t win Iowa, they should at least work toward stopping Cruz from running away with a victory.

.. A primary target of such a campaign would be Iowa’s churches, where Cruz’s opponents believe parishioners have been misled about the Texas senator’s record on the issue of same-sex marriage.

.. While Cruz’s remarks do not represent an overt contradiction, his view — that each state should make its own marriage laws — is atypical for a candidate who, like Cruz, has worked tirelessly (and rather successfully) to win the endorsements of Evangelical leaders across the country.

..  “There isn’t a substantive policy difference between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz,” Beynon says of the immigration dispute. “The difference is, Marco Rubio is honest about his position. So while Senator Santorum disagrees with both of them, at least Senator Rubio is being honest with the American people about what his position is.”

Marco Rubio and the Problem of the Political Natural

Rubio’s conservatism is not in any major substantive way an update of George W. Bush’s, and if you hated the original you probably won’t love the sequel, which harbors the same instinctive militarism, rigid social conservatism, and gauzy talk of freedom. But Rubio has President Obama’s sharp, outsider eye for human longing and suffering: his talent is in giving stray, chaotic conservative interests an emotional coherence. Walking away, I had the same feeling I’ve had each time I’ve seen him: the man is a natural.

.. The comedy of this combat is that the politics of the Republican primary more or less forbid Rubio from making the obvious case against Cruz—that he is too conservative to be elected President—and so Rubio has gamely fought to tarnish Cruz as an “isolationist hawk,” noting that taking an isolationist line during the Tea Party ascendancy, as the Texan did, before insisting that he would “carpet bomb” ISIS until “the sand glows,” as Cruz has done recently, suggests someone who is fundamentally not serious about being President.

Can the Religious Right Give Ted Cruz the Win?

But perhaps most important, the ideological foundation of the religious-right experiment has been exposed for the sham it always was. The movement’s pioneers once believed that if religious leaders and their constituents banded together, they could consolidate political power and leverage it to legislate a more moral agenda. But the cold hard truth is that religion is just not as influential in most Americans’ lives as it once was. Most churchgoers no longer follow a pastor’s advice blindly when told what candidate to vote for or which position to take on an issue. Americans do their own investigations and make up their own minds, often at variance with their spiritual leaders. The sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell confirmed this in their 2012 study of Americans’ religious attitudes. They concluded: “In effect, Americans (especially young Americans) who might otherwise attend religious services are saying, ‘Well, if religion is just about conservative politics, then I’m outta here.’”