Senator Ted Cruz's announcement tomorrow at Liberty University that he'll be officially running for president, I think actually makes a lot of sense for him. Forget having an "exploratory committee" or whatever. (I've often wondered about that formality, anyway--if you've actually, seriously wanted to run for president for awhile, wouldn't you already have a pretty good idea what your chances look like?) What does he need to know? He's more credible than Donald Trump. He's more consistently conservative than Jeb Bush or Mike Huckabee. And he's less of a snooze than Bobby Jindal. (And basically,
what Kate Nocera says here.)
Choosing to announce the decision at Liberty University, one of the biggest evangelical learning institutions, makes a lot of sense, as well. He's not just the first in the race, he's going right after the attention of the religious right. (He's connections to the
Dominionist Seven Mountains movement via his father work in his favor with this group. The potential promise of a Christianist theocracy gives me the willies, of course.) He believes
things that just ain't so and has a
shaky history with the truth, but these things aren't necessarily drawbacks in modern politics. (Sigh.)
This should definitely be interesting.
3 comments:
Great to see the lunatic fringe making certain that they are well represented in the 2016 campaign. I don't think the GOP has a credible, electable candidate - the best they have, Walker, Ryan and Bush are all deeply flawed and have serious problems either in the primaries (Bush) or in the general - but to whatever extent they do a bloody, angry, divisive primary season will weaken whoever they eventually stand up...
It'll be interesting to see what other fringe candidates crawl out of the woodwork... Ben Carson? Donald Trump?
Will Huckabee's hucksterism sink him? This will be an even crazier primary season than that of the 2012 election.
I am waiting with bated breath to see if Trump's "exploratory committee" goes anywhere this time--he did fire a couple "birther" shots across Cruz's bow today. One of the sad things is, there's just no getting to the right of Cruz on very much, and this might pre-emptively thin the herd before we've wrung the proper entertainment out of some of the gam(i)er sports.
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