Ted Cruz wants to bring his aversion to compromise to the 2016 fight

[applegrove]

Ted Cruz wants to bring his aversion to compromise to the 2016 fight

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/way-out-in-right-field/2015/03/23/d881c546-d18c-11e4-8fce-3941fc548f1c_story.html?tid=rssfeed

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Here’s one way to tell Mr. Cruz (R-Tex.) from the winning constitutional scholar of 2008: Sen.?Barack Obama promised to unite the country. Mr.?Cruz — not so much. In fact, the most notable characteristic of Mr. Cruz’s brief time in elected politics has been his aversion to values that are essential to democracy’s functioning: practicality, modesty and compromise.

The platform he described in his announcement speech Monday is about what you’d expect from a candidate whom the number-crunchers at fivethirtyeight.com calculate is right of Barry Goldwater, more conservative than any serious GOP presidential hopeful in 2012 or than the other potential candidates in this election. He would end Obamacare, establish a flat tax, abolish the Internal Revenue Service and put more resources into securing the border. He promised to repeal “every word of Common Core,” even though there is little to repeal: The federal government neither wrote nor required adoption of the voluntary state education standards. It’s unclear how the Republican Party will position itself on same-sex marriage next year, but Mr. Cruz has no doubt that the next president must “uphold the sacrament of marriage.” His words on foreign affairs were mostly a critique of President Obama’s Iran policy. In a libertarian turn, Mr. Cruz also promised to reduce government seizure of e-mails and other electronic records.

Many of his fellow candidates will agree on many of these points. Mr. Cruz’s unique contribution — if one can call it that — has been his confrontational, ideology-driven style and tactics, marked by a refusal to compromise even when that leads to national dysfunction and embarrassment. He led Republicans to a quixotic, ineffective and costly government shutdown in 2013, Congress’s nadir since he took office.

It has been more than a decade since Mr.?Obama derided “the pundits” who “like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states.” If those divisions have proven less mutable than he predicted, the answer is not to give up on progress: it is to look for leaders who understand that progress and principle can go hand in hand, and who have the pragmatic skills to make that happen. Candidate Cruz instead suggested he will make his consequences-be-damned attitude a selling point. His campaign logo consists of stars and stripes shaped into a flame. “Imagine millions of courageous conservatives, all across America, rising up together to say in unison, ‘We demand our liberty,’?” he exhorted his audience on Monday. In a country that needs to take its political disagreements down a notch, Mr. Cruz’s argument is that conservatives need to crank their volume up.




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