@ The American Conservative Magazine: Ted Cruz’s Latest Stunt: A Presidential Campaign
By DANIEL LARISON • March 23, 2015, 12:01 AM
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Like many other Republican would-be 2016 candidacies, a Cruz presidential bid doesn’t have a realistic chance of succeeding, but then Cruz has already shown during his very brief stint in office that success in achieving tangible results is not what interests him. Cruz likes to present himself as the most committed opponent of Obama’s agenda, and it makes no difference that his stunts and tactics have had absolutely no success in making a dent in that agenda. What counts for him is demonstrating the intensity of his opposition and pandering to voters that care a lot more about affect than they do about policy substance.
Cruz is a skillful demagogue, and he’ll be able to put on quite a show during candidate debates, but that will probably take the form of accusing the other candidates of being sell-outs and attributing views to them that they don’t hold. That is normally how he responds to criticism from within his own party. He also repeatedly misleads his followers about what can be achieved by following his lead, and then denounces people on his side for “failing” to defer to his bad leadership and blames them for the failure he orchestrated. Since he claims to believe that the party must nominate a “real” conservative in order to win, he will be at pains to portray all of his rivals as anything but that. All of this will remind the voters outside of his core supporters why so many people that have dealt with him viscerally dislike him. If his favorability numbers are any indication, Cruz annoys more people than he attracts.
Cruz will probably be able to pull 5-10% of the vote in some early states. That will be enough to bleed support from one of the more competitive movement conservative-type candidates, and in some of those states that could end up being the difference for these other candidates between finishing in the top three and languishing among the also-rans. He may definitely fail the “ought” test Ross Douthat describes here, but for a certain bloc of primary voters that won’t matter. Since the purpose of the campaign is just to raise Cruz’s profile at the expense of his ostensible political goals, it will be like every other Cruz effort of the last two years. I would say that a presidential campaign is self-defeating for Cruz, but it actually serves his own narrow political interests while undermining the interests of conservatives more broadly.
Relative moderates come away with Republican nominations in one cycle after another partly because conservative voters are always split five or six ways and usually don’t get behind a single candidate soon enough. Republicans have the same problem again, but it is even worse than usual because the field promises to be much larger than it has been in previous cycles. Cruz’s new grandstanding as a presidential candidate will mostly work to weaken other conservatives that have a much better chance at the nomination than he does, and his campaign makes it more likely that a relative moderate will come away with the win.
Full article here (but not important, just saying he was going to announce today. This article was written after Cruz tweeted his intentions last night, at midnight)
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Same author as above, twelve hours after he wrote the above:
Cruz’s Unimaginative Announcement Speech
By DANIEL LARISON • March 23, 2015, 12:01 PM
Ted Cruz announced the start of his presidential campaign this morning at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. He stressed the importance of Christian faith in his own family, he kept returning predictably to the theme of liberty, and urged the assembled students to “imagine” a series of mostly far-fetched scenarios that would somehow be made possible through Cruz’s candidacy. He started the speech very slowly, delivered the lines from memory as he walked around the stage, and gradually worked up to his normal litany of talking points. Listening to the speech felt like hearing a sermon combined with an infomercial.
The student audience responded with a fair amount of enthusiasm. The loudest applause came after Cruz said, “Imagine a president who stands unapologetically with the nation of Israel.” Along with a standard hawkish line about not letting Iran have a nuclear weapon, this was the only foreign policy reference in the speech that I can recall*. It is not surprising, but there was very little to distinguish this speech from anything Cruz has said before at activist meetings and political conferences. Considering how often he called on the audience to imagine this or that, there was nothing very imaginative in the content of the speech. One of his lines about “repealing every word of Common Core” was typically misleading, since there is no relevant law that could be repealed at the federal level.
Notably, the speech didn’t really contain an argument for why Cruz is qualified to be president. Despite going on at some length about his parents and his wife, Cruz had remarkably little to say about his own career, which is usually something that a presidential candidate emphasizes. The entire exercise was aimed at telling conservatives, especially religious conservatives, “I am one of you, so vote accordingly.” As an exercise in pure pandering and blatant identity politics, it seems to have been reasonably successful. If the goal was to persuade skeptical conservatives that he could be a plausible nominee, it didn’t work very well.
* Correction: Cruz also made a boilerplate reference to “defeating radical Islam.” My apologies for the oversight.
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http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/cruzs-unimaginative-announcement-speech/
