Today’s Boston Globe has a mock edition of the paper, a sort of preview of what we might expect to be reading should Donald Trump be elected president. (Full disclosure: my son works at the Globe and likely worked on the mock edition) This is a worthy endeavor, but we must remember that each and every one of the remaining candidates presents a clear and present danger to the future of the Republic, including the candidate the Globe endorsed in the Massachusetts primary (John Kasich). Each of them is extreme, Kasich having proven it in his present job as governor of Ohio.
The downside of the push to demonize Trump (and he should be demonized), is that the press as a whole (the Globe is not yet guilty of this) feels obligated to pump up his rivals. As I’ve written before, it’s a given that the press will sooner or later start selling the loathsome Ted Cruz as a reasonable alternative to the Donald.
In fact, that process has apparently begun. Time Magazine has fulfilled a prediction made by the Onion months ago, and put a picture of Ted Cruz on the cover with a supportive headline (“Likable enough”). Time noted that it’s headline was not identical to that posited by the Onion, but then, they would have been incredibly stupid to replicate the Onion’s satirical headline. The burden of the piece is to suggest that contrary to what everyone says about him, including many of his supporters, Ted Cruz is not one of the biggest assholes on the planet.
TIME’s cover story is headlined, “Likable Enough?” with a fetching portrait of Cruz with a mischievous look on his face and a lovely ice blue tie. He looks exceedingly likable and once you read the stories within, you’ll have to conclude that the man who virtually everyone who’s ever known him finds repulsive is terribly misunderstood. Where you might have thought the man was a doctrinaire right winger, steeped in religious fanaticism and radical free market extremism, you will find out that he’s actually a good old boy, salt of the earth populist. (One hopes for his sake that nobody leaves a copy lying around on the yachts of some of the billionaires who’ve been writing ten million dollar checks on his behalf. It could get awkward.)
via Hullabaloo
This is probably what we can expect on a wider scale as the convention approaches. Until and unless it becomes clear that Paul Ryan is the most likely beneficiary of a stolen convention, the media will be peddling some variant of this line. If that does become conventional wisdom, expect to see Cruz morph back into, well, into an asshole. There really isn’t a word in my Thesaurus that works as well.
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