PALM BEACH, Fla. — In a wide-ranging speech to the Club for Growth winter meeting Friday night, Sen. Ted Cruz looked back on his 2013 crusade to defund Obamacare — an effort that consumed Washington, led to bitter Republican party infighting, and resulted in a partial government shutdown — and concluded it was a fight he probably never could have won.
“Is it likely we would have altogether defunded Obamacare then?” the Texas Republican said. “Probably not. That would have taken an almost perfect storm. I was never Pollyannaish about the political factors it would take for that to happen.”
As the 2013 battle began, Cruz said victory was within reach if Republicans simply stuck together. But Friday night, he explained that what was actually possible was “a middle ground compromise” in which President Obama would have been forced to give way on some aspects of Obamacare. Such a compromise “would have provided some significant relief to the millions of people losing their jobs, losing their health insurance, losing their doctors because of Obamacare,” Cruz said.
Cruz, who is considering a 2016 run for president, conceded that “I made some mistakes” in the shutdown battle. “The single biggest mistake … is I think that I and our allies did not spend enough time explaining the specific strategy to elite opinion makers,” Cruz said. “And I think there was confusion that made it less effective.”
Whatever mistakes he believes he made, Cruz reserved the biggest blame for the Republican Senate leadership under Sen. Mitch McConnell, whom Cruz never mentioned by name. Conceding that the defunders’ plan “went awry,” Cruz said the big problem stemmed from the GOP leadership. “What we did not anticipate was that Senate Republican leadership would actively, vigorously, vocally lead the fight against House Republicans,” Cruz said. “Once that happened, it became almost impossible to win that battle.”
