“We’re winning because we’re uniting the Republican Party,” Ted Cruz said in his victory speech after Wisconsin. He reached out not just to his own party but beyond it, quoting John Kennedy on the lighting of candles, and welcoming old foes and RINOs of many years standing happily into the fold.
Proudly, he spoke of leading a coalition of which Jeb Bush was a member, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham, who at one point joked about having him murdered. But bygones were bygones and this was a moment about hope and unity: “We’ve got the full spectrum of the Republican Party, coming together and uniting behind this campaign.”
So Cruz is now a uniter, a Big Tent enthusiast, bringing all wings of the party together, as well as being (according to Donald Trump) a Trojan horse used by the establishment to bring down the one true outsider, himself.
If not for the drama of Trump, and the on-going saga of Hillary Clinton, the transformation, adaptation and forced growth of Cruz under the pressure of unforeseen circumstance would be the only big story — and one of the strangest ones told.
Cruz, let us remember, was that rare politician who began his career planning on purpose to divide his own party. Perhaps he had listened to too much talk radio, which says that the Republican Establishment and not the Democrats are the real enemy; that movement conservatives are a silent majority who will rise and smite all if only sufficiently inspired; and that the way to win their enduring devotion is to tackle the RINOs head on.
This might have been okay if he planned to stay in Texas, start a magazine, a la William F. Buckley, or get his own talk show. But for a man who had planned from birth if not sooner to make himself president, it appeared catastrophic. The very conservative base, after all, was less than one-third of the national party he would be required to lead.
Henry Olsen, the elections expert at National Review and the Ethics and Public Policy Center, ranks the Republican Party as 25-30% moderate/liberal; 35-40% as somewhat conservative (the dominant bloc that determines the winner), and 25-35% as the social and secular very conservative, who would be the Cruz base. Cruz seemed determined to play to his base, which was not a great strategy. And then Donald Trump intervened.
For a long time, Trump and Cruz shared the outsider lane of the candidates while the establishment lane tore itself into pieces, a phase that ended March 15 with that lane swimming in blood. Cruz and the establishment saw the barbarian storming the gates of the castle, saw the dead bodies, and jumped.
The establishment took as its own someone to the right of most of its members and more importantly, personally hated by some number of them. Cruz acceded to the head of a coalition broader than his own, which included elements of all of the party and went by the name of “Stop Trump.” Cruz did not have to drop his ideas, but he did have to appeal to a much wider audience. Wisconsin was his first test, and he passed.
Olsen wrote Wednesday he had criticized Cruz before as he focused solely upon the very conservative, ignoring the other two-thirds of the GOP spectrum, “But last night’s results show that the pugnacious Senator may finally have broken through with the voter group [the somewhat conservative] that always decides who wins.”
Wonders never cease, and this may be one of them. We’ll find out quite soon if it is.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
