The speech Ted Cruz delivered Monday to launch his presidential campaign is already becoming known in politics shorthand as the “imagine speech,” for Cruz’s repeated use of the word — but Cruz is hardly the first candidate, even in this cycle, to bring an audience along for an extended thought experiment.
“I want to ask each of you to imagine, imagine millions of courageous conservatives, all across America, rising up together to say in unison, ‘We demand our liberty,'” the Texas senator said.
Cruz went on to envision nearly every facet of America if he were president, using the word “imagine” again and again.
The speech was immediately likened to John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and unsurprisingly, the Internet quickly produced a version of Cruz’s speech set to the tune of Lennon’s classic. But urging audiences to visualize a transformed America is in fact nothing new to presidential politics.
In 2014, Rand Paul opened his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference with a string of ideas to “imagine.”
“Imagine with me for a moment, imagine a time when liberty is again spread from coast to coast,” Paul said. “Imagine a time when our great country is again governed by the Constitution. Imagine a time when the White House is once again occupied by a friend of liberty.”
At CPAC in 2015, Marco Rubio encouraged an even more detailed thought exercise.
“Imagine if we cut our taxes and simplified our taxes and our regulatory code. Imagine if we balanced our budget. Imagine if we repealed and replaced Obamacare,” Rubio said. “If we did these things, our economy would create millions of better paying jobs, and the American Dream would reach more people than it’s ever reached before.”
Rubio didn’t stop there, but went on to imagine “leaders who understood that the family, not government, is the most important organization in society,” “policies that help people acquire skills,” “laws protect(ing) innocent human life,” “a commander in chief that understood that the way to defeat ISIS is not to find them a job,” and a secretary of state who does not believe “that the world is safer today than it’s ever been.”
Vice President Joe Biden, who has said he is open to the idea of running for president, might have set the recent standard for the genre during a commencement address at Wake Forest University in May 2009.
“Imagine what we can do,” Biden said. “Imagine a country where within a decade, 20 percent of our energy is from renewable sources, where we’re no longer dependent on unstable dictatorships for our energy.”
“Imagine a country that invests in every child in America where you’ve learned we should be investing at age three instead of six, where every single qualified — young man or woman qualified to go to college is able to go to college regardless of their financial circumstances,” Biden continued. “Imagine a country where healthcare is affordable and available to every single American, where American business can compete again because they don’t bear all the cost; where we can once again gain control of our fiscal future, which is being drowned by the cost of healthcare.”
Biden went on to imagine an America “where our carbon footprint shrinks to nothing, and we set an example for the whole world to follow,” “brought together by powerful ideas, not torn apart by petty ideologies,” “built on innovation and efficiency, not on credit default swaps and complex securities,” “that values science again,” “that lifts up windows of opportunity, doesn’t slam them shut,” “where every single person has a fighting chance, “that once again leads the world by the power of our example and not merely by the example of our power.”
But Cruz has set a new bar for imagining in one speech. Whereas Biden used the word “imagine” 13 times in his speech, even inflating his total with a few superfluous instances of “just imagine,” Cruz numbered 38 instances of the word. Imagine that.
