2016 Postmortem

DonViejo

(60,536 posts) Mon Mar 23, 2015, 07:59 PM Mar 2015

Loathed and over-hyped: Why Ted Cruz’s path to the nomination is so narrow

The first official '16 candidate, for all the attention, is little more than a niche candidate. Here's why

JIM NEWELL

Ted Cruz is running for president, which will come as welcome news to the approximately 20% of Americans who can tolerate him, and excellent news to the 5-10% or so who inexplicably hope to see him advance higher in the ranks of American government. The junior senator from Texas has a low ceiling for political support. He speaks well, but not broadly. Most people don’t share his political ideology. That’s because most people don’t have a political ideology, and political ideology is all that he does have.

No words can describe Cruz’s low-ceiling problem better than this 46-second clip from a couple of weeks ago. Cruz, like several other candidates, was speaking at a forum hosted by the International Association of Firefighters. A firefighters’ union is a perfect representation of the sort of organization that a viable Republican presidential candidate must be able to appeal to. Like police unions, they’re more conservative than other labor groups, but also more concerned with economic security than realizing the Grand Project of implementing a free-market utopia.

Cruz, instead of tailoring his speech to this sort of audience, offered the same zingers that he’s been tossing out to enthusiastic cheers at conservative movement confabs like CPAC. There’s the one about abolishing the IRS and sending all of the IRS agents to the border. Heh indeedy. The line about how there are more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible, but the Bible is better, or whatever. “Repeal every last word of Obamacare,” that’s in there.

The IAFF attendees responded to these lines with stone-cold silence. As one IAFF official told Bloomberg’s Dave Weigel afterwards, “I had to take a shower after listening to that.”