FarmerJohn
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Ross Dothan, MARCH 26, 2016
ENOUGH, for one week at least, about the strange victories of Donald Trump. Let’s talk about the mysteries of his last real competitor, Ted Cruz.
On the surface, Cruz is a straightforward figure: The ideological zealot, the politician-as-activist, the unbending embodiment of True Conservatism. He’s the scourge of Obamacare, the bane of the G.O.P. establishment, the evangelical moralist with a flat-tax plan and a Reagan quote for every occasion. If Trump has dynamited Republican orthodoxy and tapped out nasty tweets from the rubble, Cruz has kept pace by promising to rebuild that same orthodoxy stronger than before.
In this framing, Cruz is basically Barry Goldwater come again, an ideological crusader who might still grab his party’s nomination, but whose general election prospects are limited by his own extremism.
I’ve used this framing myself, and it might be the best way to approach a Hillary-Cruz race. But it also seems inadequate to understanding Cruz’s strange ascent.
Start at the intuitive level. Despite what you may have heard, true belief is pretty common among politicians. Listen to Rand Paul talk about liberty or Marco Rubio dilate on the promise of America; watch Bernie Sanders rail against inequality or President Obama defend technocratic liberalism. They all radiate sincerity. Watch a Goldwater speech: you can tell the man believed it.
With Cruz, though, even the most fervent peroration always feels like a debater’s patter, an advocate’s brief — compelling enough on the merits, but more of a command performance than a window into deep conviction.
This doesn’t mean that Cruz’s conservatism isn’t sincere. But the fact that he seems so much like an actor hitting his marks fits with the story of how he became Mr. True Conservative Outsider in the first place. Basically, he spent years trying to make it in Washington on the insider’s track, and hit a wall because too many of the insiders didn’t like him — because his ambition was too naked, his climber’s zeal too palpable. So he deliberately switched factions, turning the establishment’s personal disdain into a political asset, and taking his Ivy League talents to the Tea Party instead.
Then once installed as a leader of the counterestablishment, he walked a line that looks, again, far more calculated than most conviction politicians. While his fellow Tea Party senators, from Paul to Rubio to Utah’s Mike Lee, built detailed policy portfolios that fit their interests and inclinations, Cruz never seemed to take a step on any contentious issue without gaming it out 17 moves ahead.
His push for the Obamacare shutdown, and the bill of goods he sold the party’s base, was a particularly remarkably exercise in self-serving political cynicism. But on many fronts — Edward Snowden, trade policy, immigration, the fate of Middle Eastern Christians — Cruz has proceeded with several fingers in the wind; every time the conservative mood has shifted even a little, he’s shifted quickly too.
The same pattern has prevailed in the presidential campaign, in his complicated relationship to Trump — obsequious at first, cynically imitative on issues where Trump’s demagogy has worked, and finally self-righteous and dudgeon-filled now that the name-calling and scandal-mongering have been turned against his reputation and his family.
Throughout this rise, Cruz has often seemed less like Goldwater than like American conservatism’s own Kenneth Widmerpool, the most memorable character in the English novelist Anthony Powell’s series, “A Dance to the Music of Time.”
A dogged, charmless, unembarrassed striver, Widmerpool begins Powell’s novels as a figure of mockery for his upper-class schoolmates. But over the course of the books he ascends past them — to power, influence, a peerage — through a mix of ruthless effort, ideological flexibility, and calculated kissing-up.
Enduring all manner of humiliations, bouncing back from every setback, tacking right and left with the times, he embodies the triumph of raw ambition over aristocratic rules of order. “Widmerpool,” the narrator realizes at last, sounding like a baffled, Cruz-hating Republican senator today, “once so derided by all of us, had in some mysterious manner become a person of authority.”
This is not exactly a flattering comparison. But the American reader, less enamored of a fated aristocratic order, may find aspects of Widmerpool’s character curiously sympathetic. And some of that strange sympathy could be extended to Cruz.
Unloved, unattractive, a Simpsons-quoting nerd still chasing the teenage dream of world domination, the Texas senator has outworked, out-organized and outlasted the candidates who were supposed to beat him, from the blueblood to the jock.
His cynicism can be repellent, his message discipline exhausting, and his Reagan-vintage policy proposals induce a mild despair. But in the drama of this insane campaign, he has actually earned his position, and if his doggedness wins the Republican nomination on the second ballot it will be one of the most fascinating triumphs in recent political history.
Though it will also probably be short-lived. But if you think a little thing like losing a general election will dispose of Ted Cruz’s ambitions, you don’t know Ted Cruz.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/o...n=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection
ENOUGH, for one week at least, about the strange victories of Donald Trump. Let’s talk about the mysteries of his last real competitor, Ted Cruz.
On the surface, Cruz is a straightforward figure: The ideological zealot, the politician-as-activist, the unbending embodiment of True Conservatism. He’s the scourge of Obamacare, the bane of the G.O.P. establishment, the evangelical moralist with a flat-tax plan and a Reagan quote for every occasion. If Trump has dynamited Republican orthodoxy and tapped out nasty tweets from the rubble, Cruz has kept pace by promising to rebuild that same orthodoxy stronger than before.
In this framing, Cruz is basically Barry Goldwater come again, an ideological crusader who might still grab his party’s nomination, but whose general election prospects are limited by his own extremism.
I’ve used this framing myself, and it might be the best way to approach a Hillary-Cruz race. But it also seems inadequate to understanding Cruz’s strange ascent.
Start at the intuitive level. Despite what you may have heard, true belief is pretty common among politicians. Listen to Rand Paul talk about liberty or Marco Rubio dilate on the promise of America; watch Bernie Sanders rail against inequality or President Obama defend technocratic liberalism. They all radiate sincerity. Watch a Goldwater speech: you can tell the man believed it.
With Cruz, though, even the most fervent peroration always feels like a debater’s patter, an advocate’s brief — compelling enough on the merits, but more of a command performance than a window into deep conviction.
This doesn’t mean that Cruz’s conservatism isn’t sincere. But the fact that he seems so much like an actor hitting his marks fits with the story of how he became Mr. True Conservative Outsider in the first place. Basically, he spent years trying to make it in Washington on the insider’s track, and hit a wall because too many of the insiders didn’t like him — because his ambition was too naked, his climber’s zeal too palpable. So he deliberately switched factions, turning the establishment’s personal disdain into a political asset, and taking his Ivy League talents to the Tea Party instead.
Then once installed as a leader of the counterestablishment, he walked a line that looks, again, far more calculated than most conviction politicians. While his fellow Tea Party senators, from Paul to Rubio to Utah’s Mike Lee, built detailed policy portfolios that fit their interests and inclinations, Cruz never seemed to take a step on any contentious issue without gaming it out 17 moves ahead.
His push for the Obamacare shutdown, and the bill of goods he sold the party’s base, was a particularly remarkably exercise in self-serving political cynicism. But on many fronts — Edward Snowden, trade policy, immigration, the fate of Middle Eastern Christians — Cruz has proceeded with several fingers in the wind; every time the conservative mood has shifted even a little, he’s shifted quickly too.
The same pattern has prevailed in the presidential campaign, in his complicated relationship to Trump — obsequious at first, cynically imitative on issues where Trump’s demagogy has worked, and finally self-righteous and dudgeon-filled now that the name-calling and scandal-mongering have been turned against his reputation and his family.
Throughout this rise, Cruz has often seemed less like Goldwater than like American conservatism’s own Kenneth Widmerpool, the most memorable character in the English novelist Anthony Powell’s series, “A Dance to the Music of Time.”
A dogged, charmless, unembarrassed striver, Widmerpool begins Powell’s novels as a figure of mockery for his upper-class schoolmates. But over the course of the books he ascends past them — to power, influence, a peerage — through a mix of ruthless effort, ideological flexibility, and calculated kissing-up.
Enduring all manner of humiliations, bouncing back from every setback, tacking right and left with the times, he embodies the triumph of raw ambition over aristocratic rules of order. “Widmerpool,” the narrator realizes at last, sounding like a baffled, Cruz-hating Republican senator today, “once so derided by all of us, had in some mysterious manner become a person of authority.”
This is not exactly a flattering comparison. But the American reader, less enamored of a fated aristocratic order, may find aspects of Widmerpool’s character curiously sympathetic. And some of that strange sympathy could be extended to Cruz.
Unloved, unattractive, a Simpsons-quoting nerd still chasing the teenage dream of world domination, the Texas senator has outworked, out-organized and outlasted the candidates who were supposed to beat him, from the blueblood to the jock.
His cynicism can be repellent, his message discipline exhausting, and his Reagan-vintage policy proposals induce a mild despair. But in the drama of this insane campaign, he has actually earned his position, and if his doggedness wins the Republican nomination on the second ballot it will be one of the most fascinating triumphs in recent political history.
Though it will also probably be short-lived. But if you think a little thing like losing a general election will dispose of Ted Cruz’s ambitions, you don’t know Ted Cruz.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/o...n=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection
