Posted on 04/02/2015 6:16:36 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was born in 1970, six years after events refuted a theory on which he is wagering his candidacy. The 1964 theory was that many millions of conservatives abstained from voting because the GOP did not nominate sufficiently deep-dyed conservatives. So if in 1964 the party would choose someone like Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, hitherto dormant conservatives would join the electorate in numbers sufficient for victory.
This theory was slain by a fact — actually, 15,951,378 facts. That was the difference between the 43,129,566 votes President Lyndon Johnson received and the 27,178,188 that Goldwater got on the way to winning six states.
The sensible reason for nominating Goldwater was not because he could win: As Goldwater understood, Americans still recovering from the Kennedy assassination were not going to have a third president in 14 months. The realistic reason was to turn the GOP into a conservative weapon for a future assault on the ramparts of power. Hence in September 1964, William F. Buckley told an audience of young conservatives to anticipate Goldwater’s defeat because he had been nominated “before we had time properly to prepare the ground.” The candidacy had, however, planted “seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future.” Sixteen Novembers later, they did.
Today, however, there is no need to nominate Cruz in order to make the GOP conservative. Cruz sits in a Senate that has no Republicans akin to the liberals Goldwater served with — New York’s Jacob Javits, Massachusetts’s Edward Brooke, Illinois’s Charles Percy, New Jersey’s Clifford Case, California’s Thomas Kuchel. When Jeb Bush, the most conservative governor of a large state since Ronald Reagan (by some metrics — taxes, school choice — Bush was a more conservative governor than Reagan), is called a threat to conservatism,
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Because of their base and (foreign) funding, the Dems have no choice but to offer the voters high taxes, government nosiness, alien amnesty, national helplessness, and sodomy. These things are not electorally attractive. Cruz has made himself a credible antidote to all of them.
George Will is an expert at missing the big picture.
First time I've ever heard that theory, and Goldwater was considered conservative especially compared to LBJ who had escorted the Civil Rights Act through in 1964, along with many 'Great Society' programs most conservatives opposed.
Will's not making much sense and LBJ won primarily because most of the country was still mourning JFK.
Stick to analyzing baseball George, where you suck only marginally less than you do analyzing politics.
Absolutely. In 79 and 80 we were all ashamed. Who punishes their own Olympic athletes, not to mention interest rates, hostages held by Iran. I knew Bambi would make Carter look like Margaret Thatcher. I didn’t know he would transform USA into a third world marxist bed of corruption.
Seems like more anger than shame this time. Maybe it’s my older age.
George is analyzing the wrong America and learning the wrong lessons.
Mushy Republicans always lose.
We want and need a CONSERVATIVE who stands for something.
We DO NOT want or need liberal lite.
“Frankly, I don’t see a dimes worth of difference on policy between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. If there is a difference, please let me know.”
Jeb Bush is an ideologically cunning runt.
Just plain wrong. Susan Collins, Mark Kirk, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Thad (Senile) Cochran, Kelly Ayotte, and others are more big Government than even those "Republicans" were -- and I grew up in New York with Javits as my senator. (You don't know how happy we were to defeat him.)
So, George, explain how it is that Ronald Reagan won in two landslides but Dole, McCain, and Romney lost.
And the claim that Jeb Bush is more conservative than Ronald Reagan is laughable.
Just as Bush Sr. got elected by implicitly promising to be the third term for Reagan, and when he wasn't, he got booted.
Exactly the thinking of the RINO consultant class.
Keep in mind this is a guy who favored Howard Baker over Ronald Reagan in the 1980 GOP primary.
Agreed, but there is a historical twist to add here.
The media sell out is so total on the left, they are so fully immersed in the "success" of the bamster, they will go to no end to sell him to the public.
Consider the reporting on Benghazi and the unsuccessful helicopter rescue of the American hostages in Iran. They succeeded in portraying zero culpability and irresponsibility on the bamsters part, they did not do that back in 1980 for Carter.
They want to make certain that another Reagan cannot succeed, that no other rat will fail.
To me, that's the very reason we need someone like Cruz, who handles the media better than anyone since Reagan, who is fearless in confronting the evil of the left with a smile, a devastating critique, and a vision for a better way.
Cruz 2016!
Just what is the difference between a “centrist democrat” and a “moderate republican?”
Republicans don’t like Ted Cruz and blame him for the 2013 government shutdown. It’s kind of strange — you get elected to do a job, you go do it and keep your word to your electorate and they dislike you for it. And the Democrats and media are playing the he’s-a-Canadian-card, which is kind of funny because the Democrat in the White House has spent a ton of money to seal his school records and only produced a certificate of live birth.
Cruz went to Washington and spoke the truth and chose not to walk the same path that so many others have done before and he went against the veteran Republicans like Speaker John Boehner and Sen. John McCain and the GOP establishment. Maybe that is what this country needs: someone who exercises the will of the voter and not the establishment.
Will is obsessed with Cruz. He first comes out and says that Cruz is a “candidate as good as it gets” on Fox News panel, then writes article after article slamming him. Sounds like he got orders from someone.
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