Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) made it clear that he’s not steering away from his conservative principles — and his party shouldn’t either — during his speech at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday morning.
“We stand with a straight-forwarded and bold, positive agenda, to inspire the young, to inspire women, to inspire Hispanics, to inspire everybody,” he said. “Number one, defend the Constitution. All of it.”
Specifically addressing the younger folks in the crowd, Cruz blamed Obama’s policies for the bleak outlook many young people have for the nation’s future. He argued that order to win over these voters Republicans need to keep their message simple: Tell the truth.
“If you were to sit down and try and design an agenda to hammer the living daylights out of young people, you couldn’t do better than the Obama administration,” he said.
The Texas Republican also proposed a series of reforms that he hopes the party will push, including natural gas drilling, school choice and the repeal of Dodd-Frank. In discussing the controversial financial bill, Cruz warned against not just its financial implications – but the moral ones as well.
“We need to stop bankrupting our country,” he said. “You know right now, our kids and grandkids are inheriting a country where the national debt is larger than the size of our entire economy. And let me speak right now to everyone in the room who didn’t applaud when I said ‘Are there any young people here?’ What we’re doing to our kids and grandkids is morally wrong. It’s an outrage.”
The freshman Senator also took the time to pay homage to former Tonight Show host Jay Leno, mimicking the comedian’s viral impression of Obama’s “If you like your job” routine.
“Last fall Jay Leno said, ‘so uh, President Obama called me, he said, ‘Jay, if you like your job, you can keep it’,” he said.
The biggest round of applause for Cruz, however, came as he called for the repeal of “every single word of Obamacare.”
“When millions of Americans stood up last Fall and said, ‘Stop this train wreck, this disaster that is Obamacare, that is hurting millions of people,’ the Democrats said, the mainstream media, although I repeat myself, they said, ‘This is hopeless don’t you understand, just accept this, you can’t do anything to stop this,’” he said. “Yes we can.”
