Ted Cruz
February 12, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Ted Cruz’s campaign has produced this ad called “Damn, it feels good to be Clinton.” The ad is based on a famous scene from the movie “Office Space.” It combines the scene with lyrics based on the song “Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.” I was unfamiliar with both the movie and the song. Even so, I found the ad hilarious. Tevi Troy has written that Republican candidates
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February 3, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
I wrote here about the use by Ted Cruz’s campaign in Iowa of a mailer to potential caucus-goers that was labeled: “ELECTION ALERT,” “VOTER VIOLATION,” “PUBLIC RECORD,” and “FURTHER ACTION NEEDED.” It told recipients: You are receiving this election notice because of low expected voter turnout in your area. Your individual voting history as well as your neighbors’ are public record. Their scores are published below, and many of them
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February 3, 2016 — Steven Hayward
Well not really, but as with Damon Linker’s article attacking Marco Rubio, it reads like high praise of Cruz indeed. Speaking earlier today in London, old peanut brain said that if he had to choose, he preferred Donald Trump because Trump is more “malleable.” Here’s the report from The Mirror: “If I had a choice of Republican nominees, between Cruz and Trump, I think I would choose. Trump – which
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February 3, 2016 — John Hinderaker
No doubt you are aware of the controversy over the Cruz campaign’s sneak attack on Ben Carson on the evening of the Iowa caucuses. The Carson campaign said that when he left Iowa, he would return home for a few days rather than flying directly to New Hampshire or South Carolina. CNN broke the news in a tweet in an on-air report, making Carson’s plan sound odd and potentially significant:
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February 2, 2016 — Steven Hayward
The rest of the gang has already weighed in with useful thoughts, but to paraphrase the great political philosopher Marx (Groucho), if you don’t like these thoughts, we have others! Scott and others have mentioned the significance of Cruz winning while opposing Iowa’s sacrosanct ethanol madness. I recall meeting, some years ago, with a presidential candidate before his announcement to talk about energy policy, and when I suggested that the
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February 1, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
“Three tickets out of Iowa.” It sounds like a movie starring, say, Glenn Ford, Henry Fonda (or Peter in the remake), and Van Heflin. Actually, it’s the conventional wisdom regarding Iowa caucuses. When there’s a large field, Iowa punches three candidates’ ticket to New Hampshire and beyond, or so they say. The conventional wisdom happens to hold up well this year. As John says, after Iowa it looks like a
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February 1, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
The final Des Moines Register poll, released over the weekend, shows Donald Trump leading the Republican field in Iowa. He has 28 percent support compared to 23 percent for Ted Cruz and 15 percent for Marco Rubio. Among Democrats, Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders by a narrow 45-42 tally. If this poll accurately predicts the outcome, it won’t be a happy night for me. I’m rooting for Sanders and either
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January 30, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Sarah Rumpf reports that Ted Cruz’s campaign has sent certain Iowa voters a large card printed to look like a manila envelope on one side and labeled: “ELECTION ALERT,” “VOTER VIOLATION,” “PUBLIC RECORD,” and “FURTHER ACTION NEEDED.” The text of the mailing stated: You are receiving this election notice because of low expected voter turnout in your area. Your individual voting history as well as your neighbors’ are public record.
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January 29, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
I strongly recommend Sean Trende’s three-part series about the rise of Donald Trump. The series has graced the “picks” section of our main-page this week. It represents the most incisive analysis of the Trump phenomenon I’ve read. Here are the links to Part I, Part II, and Part III. I’m going to focus on Part II — “Cruz, Trump and the Missing White Voters.” In this article, Trende makes the
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January 22, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Check out Ted Cruz’s excellent new ad attacking Donald Trump over eminent domain. This is the kind of information Trump’s rival candidates should have started putting out months ago when it became clear that Trump is for real. Instead, by and large they (1) indulged in the fantasy that Trump would fade away, (2) worried that Trump would fight back to their detriment, and/or (3) attacked lesser candidates (but better
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January 21, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Ted Cruz is campaigning on the idea that the “establishment” is uniting behind GOP frontrunner Donald Trump. He told reporters in New Hampshire: We’re seeing something remarkable happening in this Republican primary. Right now, the Washington establishment is abandoning Marco Rubio, they’ve made the assessment that Marco can’t win this race, and the Washington establishment is rushing over to support Donald Trump. We’re seeing that happen every day, and Mr.
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January 15, 2016 — Steven Hayward
Lawrence Tribe is one of the liberal eminences at Harvard Law School, author of a leading constitutional law casebook (that for many editions failed to include the text of the Constitution, until Ed Meese embarrassed him about that fact back in the 1980s), and a ringleader of the shameless and demagogic mob that derailed Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination back in 1987. But right now Trump and lots of liberals
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January 14, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
The GOP presidential debates are like a typical television series. The quality of actors doesn’t vary much from episode to episode, nor does the general nature of the characters they play. What varies is which character[s] they come into conflict with in a given episode. In the debate context, this variable is driven by which candidate poll data tells a candidate he (or she) must try to smack down. Early
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January 14, 2016 — Scott Johnson
New York Times columnist David Brooks may have hit a new low with his attempted hit job on Ted Cruz in “The brutalism of Ted Cruz.” James Taranto provides a devastating analysis of Brooks’s column in “Brooks borks Cruz” (accessible via Google here, I hope). For those who know the deep meaning of pants in Brooksworld, you might say that Taranto depantses Brooks. Kent Scheidegger also addresses Brooks’s column in
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January 6, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
I’m disappointed that Ted Cruz has been describing as “neocons” some of the people whose foreign policy views don’t align with those he professes. Jonah Goldberg has called him out on this practice. Throwing the neocon label around isn’t an argument; it’s name-calling. Cruz argues well enough that he shouldn’t have to rely on name-calling. It must have gone over well with focus groups. Name-calling is bad enough. To make
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January 5, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Last night, our Iowa caucuses correspondent Dave Begley covered a Ted Cruz event in Missouri Valley. There, he ran into Washington Post correspondent Katie Zezima. Zezima, I surmised (half facetiously), must be fairly new to the Post because I don’t recall attacking her work. But there’s alternative explanation; she might be a fair reporter. That’s how she seemed to Begley and that’s how she comes across in a report called
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January 5, 2016 — Steven Hayward
Ted Cruz’s campaign is out today with a well-produced and effective ad about immigration that I think works on several levels—especially at puncturing the elite insulation from the issue. Indeed, once upon a time liberals opposed unlimited unskilled immigration precisely because they understood that it was bad for unskilled labor in the U.S. But that was back when at least some liberals had a minimal amount of economic literacy. (Heck,
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