Cruz’s game plan
by digby
I wrote about Ted Cruz for Salon this morning. Keep your eye on him. He’s the natural heir to the Trump/Carson freakshow:
I have made the point before that if I were a betting person, I’d put a couple of bucks on Ted Cruz to be that someone for the simple reason that he’s the guy most likely to inherit the kook constituency should Trump and/or Carson finally flame out. It’s unlikely that he’d get all of them, but the validators of right wing crazy, from local Iowa conservative radio superstar Steve Deace to Rush Limbaugh to Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham all see Cruz as either the guy or an excellent second choice, and they could certainly help move voters to his column. And the reason for that is that he is a true-believing, hard-core right wing zealot who checks off every single box — from railing about “amnesty” to hiring fanatical Christian “historian” David Barton to run his Super PAC, to leading the charge against Planned Parenthood to calling President Obama “the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism”. He is the real thing.
Trump is running on xenophobia and his own massive ego. Carson is an orthodox social conservative. Both are non-professional politicians who revel in saying what the right wing really thinks without regard to “political correctness” (also known as good manners and basic human decency). Their voters are thrilled to have a couple of candidates who “speak for them.” The problem is that neither of them are likely to be able to win a general election, and at some point enough voters may sober up and realize that. At that point they may very well look around and see that Cruz is a hated political professional, but he’s just as good at channeling their rage and believes just as fervently in in every crackpot idea that they do. And while he may be a senator, it will certainly impress them to know that he’s loathed by everyone in the Senate and all but the most radical right wingers in the House. If that’s not a sign of true conservative principle, they don’t know what is.
Cruz has plenty of money both for his campaign and in his Super Pacs. He cornered some of the big Texas billionaire money a while back. And he’s systematically going about his business cultivating all the right people so he’ll be in a perfect position to pick up the far righties who have gathered around Trump and Carson when the amateurs finally go over the cliff. Eliana Johnson of the National Review reported this week that the word in GOP circles is that he’s running a very smart campaign and will likely be one of the last men standing. Written off as an extremist by the establishment, the Trump phenomenon apparently has some of them taking another look at Cruz to see if he might sneak up on them as he did in his Texas Senate race.
Johnson wrote:
The campaign has been getting in position for a long time. Steve Deace, an Iowa-based talk-radio host who has endorsed Cruz, says that as far back as August of 2013, Cruz was asking him to set up meetings with top Iowa activists. Now, Deace says, the Texas senator has “the best [Iowa] organization I’ve ever seen,” composed of the sort of dedicated activists who put Rick Santorum over the finish line four years ago.Cruz also has a plan beyond Iowa. He has referred to the March 1 “SEC primary,” in which eight Southern states go to the polls, as his “firewall”: that is, a backstop against whatever losses he might sustain beforehand. This year, these Southern states will go to the polls before Florida and before the traditional Super Tuesday, a change in the primary calendar instituted by RNC chairman Reince Priebus. Most of those contests, unlike the ones that precede them, are not winner-take-all, and Cruz’s goal is to win the most delegates rather than to take entire states.Throughout the primary season, Cruz has crisscrossed the South, sweet-talking voters unaccustomed to playing an outsized role in presidential contests. “He has made the largest investment in those Southern states of any candidate,” [GOP strategist]Mackowiak says. “Most of those political leaders in those states have never been asked to participate in the process.”Texas is one of the “SEC primary” states, and it alone will award 155 of the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination. Cruz, of course, holds a natural advantage. His team spent over a year developing detailed knowledge of the state’s political contours just three years ago. Mackowiak says there’s a “very real possibility” that Cruz will be the overall delegate leader on March 2.