Sure, Obama's liberal to the hardcore leftists. But the low-information crowd that elected him didn't think of him that way. Obama was responding to certain circumstances at the moment like the Iraq war, and he was able to position himself in a situational way and not even have to run as an ideologue.
Good point and well said.
Cruz has followed the traditional conservative consultant's playbook -- You basically have one stump speech, you give it over and over again. And the stump speech is regionalized based on focus groups and polling.
Problem is: instead of the candidate being who he is, a consultant creates a candidate based on the consultants' polling. And while all this is going on, the candidate never has a chance to develop as a human being, because consultants turn them into robots.
And you end up slicing and dicing voters so that virtually everything the candidate says is geared toward an interest group rather than the electorate at large. You're focus-grouping interest groups, you're focus-grouping women here, men over here, immigrants here, Hispanics there, you tailor your message.
No. Ted Cruz is who he is and there doesn't appear to be much regional or demographic tinkering in his message at all. That may be his problem. Because elections are situational rather than ideological, Ted's constant ideological emphasis doesn't win uncommitted voters over to his side. And no, nobody turned Cruz into robot. That's what happened to Rubio. Any faults Ted has can't be blamed on consultants, except in so far as they couldn't change who he was..
| Good analysis. It took a lot of time to parse out what Rush was saying. And I don't think he wanted to necessarily be as clear as I reworded his dialog. I think Rush mixes up his messages purposely so that no matter who you support, it sounds like he's trying to support all parties. But when you actually analyze what he says, it often doesn't make sense, or what he said was a swag that on further thought you realize is off the mark. Rush and Cruz are on the same team. They can't get enough of Golden Sacks, Globalist, and Bush money. So they want to keep the gravy train rolling till the bitter end -- to hell with the good of the Republican Party. |