Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has stolen a page from the Donald Trump playbook in announcing his vice presidential pick on Wednesday.
Whenever it was clear to Trump that he would not dominate the media cycle on any given day — particularly after a bad primary result or debate performance — he would hastily tell the press about an “announcement” he would make the next day.
The best example of this occured in late February. The morning after Trump’s worst debate performance — this was the debate where Florida Sen. Marco Rubio began his comedy routine attacks on the GOP front-runner — he teased a “big announcement” on his Twitter account. As the networks were covering a Rubio rally and lauding the Florida senator’s explosive debate performance, Trump took the stage and announced that former rival and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was endorsing him.
Suddenly all media attention was back on Trump, and Rubio’s campaign began to unravel (he would suspend his campaign three weeks later, after losing the primary in his home state of Florida).
On Tuesday night, Trump ran away with all five states holding primaries. Cruz came in a distant second or third in each state, and his chances of getting the necessary 1,237 delegates to win the GOP nomination outright were made all but impossible.
So what does Cruz do? He could keep campaigning and trying, or he could take a quicker, easier route to injecting a jolt of energy into his campaign. On Wednesday morning, he adopted the Trump strategy of teasing a “major announcement” later in the day. Speculation began immediately, most of it surrounding the possibility that Cruz would name a vice presidential pick.
When the information was leaked ahead of the announcement time, that speculation was confirmed. Cruz would be announcing that he will select former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential pick if he becomes the Republican nominee.
So far it doesn’t look like the strategy is working. The Drudge Report — which has in recent months become an advocate for Trump — didn’t immediately post Cruz’s announcement. At the time of this writing, CNN was talking about Trump accusing Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton playing the “woman card” to get elected, MSNBC was talking about Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders staying in the race and Fox News was talking about Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania.
That could change ahead of and after Cruz’s actual announcement, but it’s hard to imagine that such information would be ignored if it were Trump doing the announcing.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
