Just how strange is it that the last remaining hope left to unite the Republican Party should be Ted Cruz? True, he seems to be the one man in sight or even existence who can address at one time the political class, the outsiders and the movement conservatives; the most right of the right, who wants to rip up the system, and yet has a flawless establishment resume. He graduated from Princeton and Harvard, became a government bureaucrat, a domestic advisor for George W. Bush and an adjunct professor of law.
In short, he’s someone who may want to burn the place down, but understands government and knows how to build it up afterwards, unlike a certain sub-literate orange-haired mogul. Also on the plus side, Cruz’s rallies are not marked by violence, he does not hire thugs who rough up reporters and he would not take four days to decide that the KKK is a very bad actor. And he has not threatened to riot if he is not nominated without having the traditional and established agreed-upon number of votes.
On the other hand, to say his prior career has not been run on the lines of “bring us together” misstates the problem by half. In fact, he has run his Senate career on division-as-principle. Having (falsely) judged conservatives to compose a critical mass of the voters, he decided the way to their hearts was to enrage his more moderate colleagues, hitting on things like the government shutdown, which forced them into uncomfortable votes.
He also supported the Senate Conservative Fund, a PAC that funded challenges to Senate incumbents, and took a long time to agree to curtail his activities. As a result, wrote Yahoo News on March 17, “Senate Republicans revile Cruz with special fervor because of their sense that he has used his time in the Senate to engage in political stunts and mock them as corrupt imbeciles …”
Cruz often cites his lack of support from GOP senators as evidence of his refusal to trade conservative values for Beltway popularity, and he has suggested that lawmakers who dislike him are part of the “Washington cartel” that he claims he is fighting. Oddly enough, it never seemed to occur to this political wiz that this might impact the presidential campaign he began in his first year in office, but the effect has been chilling. “Dislike,” said the reporter, “runs so deep that many [senators] plan to sit on their hands.”
A related problem is that Cruz has had no experience in seeking votes from people outside his own base of evangelical voters and the very conservative, and in national politics this won’t be enough. He now has to change, and to change fairly quickly, from someone who has been an impressive niche candidate to one who can appeal to the secular and the somewhat conservative, to the middle and even conservative Democrats.
This last group in the last two elections voted for Democrats but might be wanting a way not to vote for an unloved and untrusted legacy Democrat whose ethics are questioned, whose foreign policy has been rated a failure and who almost certainly would be facing indictment if she were not her party’s last hope. And things sometimes change. Just weeks ago, Lindsey Graham was comparing the choice between Cruz and Donald Trump to be like choosing between gun shots and poison; after Super Tuesday, Graham endorsed Cruz, and said he would help to raise money for him. Cruz now has either four or eight months to decide to become a uniter.
The fate of the country will rest in his hands.
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.”
