Ted Cruz, the man who makes his fellow senators look good, is apparently thinking of running for President, and at least one blogger at Daily Kos is licking his (or her) chops:
Cruz is a perfect candidate for the right: He’s as crazy as Michele Bachmann, but instead of degrees from Winona State University and the Marshall-Wythe School of Law, he’s got degrees from Princeton and Harvard. He’s managed to fuse the religious fundamentalism of Rick Santorum with the economic libertarianism of Rand Paul. And his last name is Cruz, so Reince Priebus thinks he’s got huge crossover appeal to Latinos.
I’m rooting for him to run in a big way. Cruz could never win a general election, but the delusional right won’t realize that fact until it’s too late. (Remember, even after the polls closed and states were called, these guys thought Mitt Romney was going to win.)
But even though Cruz would be another Goldwater, he presses every conservative button, so it would be a mistake to discount his capacity to win the nomination. And even though he talks a good game about standing up to “the establishment,” the establishment seems to be warming up to him: The New York State Republican Party just invited him to be their headline speaker at their annual dinner later this month even though he voted against Hurricane Sandy relief aid as one of his first acts in the Senate.
Cruz’s real liability won’t show up until the general election: He’s just too extreme for the country. But in a GOP primary without an experienced establishment favorite like Mitt Romney, that’s an asset.
(via Daily Kos: Calgary Cruz 2016!)
This is all theoretically sound, but we must be cautious. It completely discounts the astounding ability of the Democrats to throw away every political advantage that comes their way. (Witness their ham-handed response to the cynical Republican FAA ploy, and who knows how many of them will sign on to Obama’s idea to cut social security in the name of pretending to do something about a debt problem that does not presently exist) Sometimes they’ve succeeded in spite of themselves, as in 2012, but occasional past performance is no guarantee of future performance. You can’t consistently win elections by relying on people to vote for the saner of two evils. Sooner or later they’ll figure they have nothing to lose by going with the crazy guy.
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