What’s the Matter With Ted Cruz?

01 Apr, 2016 by Dave Blount

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Andrew Klavan tries and fails to figure out why Republicans don’t rally behind the best candidate their party has produced since Ronald Reagan:

Am I missing something about Ted Cruz? The Texas senator seems to me to be the one true conservative left in the presidential race, and the most true conservative who was ever in it. Graduated cum laude from Princeton, magna cum laude from Harvard. “Off the charts brilliant,” said his liberal professor Alan Dershowitz. The first Hispanic solicitor general of Texas. Authored more than 80 Supreme Court briefs and made more than 40 oral SCOTUS arguments. Won important victories on gun rights, the Pledge of Allegiance, the right to display the Ten Commandments. Sponsored close to a hundred bills during his time in the Senate.

Some snipe that he has no friends in the Senate. But even if this were true, he didn’t go there to make friends but to shake up the very “establishment” that his opponents want to commandeer for their own purposes while pretending to destroy.

Cruz is criticized for engineering the supposedly disastrous government shutdown in 2013, when he stood true to his campaign promises while others sold out the voters. But this was soon followed by a historic GOP victory in the midterms.

The confusion about Carson dropping out in Iowa was an “honest mistake at best; hardball politics at worst.”

The sleazy allegations Trump’s crony Pecker made in his tabloid are not even remotely credible. Even if there were any truth to them, they hardly compare to Trump’s appalling extramarital behavior, which has been openly and even boastfully acknowledged for decades.

So why don’t conservatives rally behind Ted Cruz?

They do rally behind him. Cruz’s opposition is not conservative.