A.
that Cruz is hated, for many
reasons, the rest of Washington hates Cruz; and
B.
that he, Trump, is a deal maker, he
knows how to make deals, you get everyone in a room and cajole and give
everybody something and make a deal.
Given that this is true…wouldn’t
Palin have been endorsing Cruz then? His life proves that he indeed makes
deals, but for whom? Always to advance himself…I think his latest deal is with
Palin…same purpose as usual.
I cannot see how any who calls
himself or herself a conservative or a Christian can vote for Donald. Not only in the primary, but this may be true
in the general election as well.
Starting today with Rich Lowry, you
will find on this blog a regular stream of carefully considered essays,
columns, etc. on this point. With some you may get a cartoon tossed in for good measure...for educational purposes, of course.
Curt
************************
The Battle for the Soul of the Right
By Rich Lowry · Jan. 23, 2016
At the moment, the Republican
establishment is relevant to the presidential-nomination battle only as an
epithet.
Less than two weeks from the Iowa
caucus, the fight for the Republican nomination isn’t so much a vicious brawl
between the grass roots and the establishment as it is a bitter struggle
between traditional conservatism and populism that few could have foreseen.
Conservatism has always had a
populist element, encapsulated by the oft-quoted William F. Buckley Jr. line
that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone
book than by the Harvard faculty. But the populism was tethered to, and in the
service of, an ideology of limited-government constitutionalism.
The fight between Ted Cruz and
Donald Trump is over whether that connection will continue to exist, and
whether the conservatism (as represented by Cruz) or the populism (as
represented by Trump) will be ascendant. Cruz did all he could as long as
possible to accommodate Trump, but now that the fight between them is out in
the open, the differences are particularly stark.
Cruz is a rigorous
constitutionalist. He’s devoted much of his career to defending the
Constitution and has argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court. Trump has
certainly heard of the Constitution, but he may know even less about it than he
knows about the Bible.
Cruz is an advocate of limited
government who is staking everything in Iowa on a principled opposition to the
ethanol mandate. As a quasi-mercantilist and crony capitalist, Trump isn’t
particularly bothered by the size of government and is happily touting his
support for a bigger ethanol mandate.
Although Cruz is more flexible than
his reputation suggests, he has the long baseline of consistency that you would
expect from a genuine believer in a political philosophy. Trump has a few
long-running themes and bugaboos, but has been all over the map on almost
everything and sometimes will meander from one position to another within the
same answer, in keeping with his lack of ideological anchor (and limited
knowledge of policy).
The two have completely different
political styles. Trump is instinctual and has a roguish charm, whereas Cruz is
earnest and tightly disciplined. If almost everything about Trump is
unconventional, Cruz is outwardly a very traditional politician.
Truth be told, the Texan is a
prodigal son of the establishment. If you just looked at Cruz’s CV and had no
idea about the mutual hatred between him and his party’s leadership, you’d
figure he was the archetypical upwardly mobile Republican politician.
The irony of Cruz’s position now is
that, despite all his outsider branding, he is not getting savaged by the
establishment. Sure, fellow senators are looking for ways to shiv him, and Iowa
Gov. Terry Branstad wants him to lose, but they aren’t his biggest worry.
It is Trump who calls him a
hypocrite and a liar. It is Trump who is hitting him on his belated disclosure
of a Goldman Sachs loan. It is Trump who says he’s a nasty guy and a maniac
with a temperament problem. And it is Trump, of course, who constantly raises
doubts about his eligibility to serve as president.
If you guessed a key event in the
nomination fight would be the “othering” of the most potent tea-party
conservative in the country by a billionaire businessman with a long trail of
liberal positions and a history of praising President Barack Obama — well,
then, you forecast the GOP race perfectly.
In short, Cruz is under assault from
a segment of the anti-establishment, although Cruz takes every opportunity to
portray himself as the victim of the machinations of dastardly political
insiders. The reality is that the establishment is sitting on its hands,
agonizing over whom it loathes least, Trump or Cruz, while the fight between
populism and conservatism rages.
The battle for the soul of the GOP
is now a battle for the soul of the right.
© 2016 by King Features Syndicate
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