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Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.azcentral.com/story/azdc/2015/03/29/ted-cruz-no-barry-goldwater-john-mccain-jeff-flake-say/70579530/

When John McCain launched his candidacy for president in 1999, the Arizonan made his announcement in front of the decommissioned aircraft carrier the USS Yorktown to underscore his military service. When Texas US Senator Ted Cruz jumped into the race for president on Monday, he did so on the “deck” of an “evangelical battleship” at the Rev. Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University. Considering the major influence evangelical voters have in the GOP primaries, especially in the early states of Iowa and South Carolina, Cruz could not have been shrewder in selecting a venue for his declaration of candidacy. Rick Santorum would...

Exclusive: Doug Wead says 1 candidate represents the past, the other the future. So what’s the difference between Republican presidential candidates Rand Paul and Ted Cruz? Ted Cruz is running against Barack Obama. Rand Paul is running against Hillary Clinton. One represents the past. The other represents the future. Both men are U.S. senators running for president in 2016. Rand Paul is from Kentucky, Ted Cruz from Texas. (Rand Paul is expected to announce his candidacy April 9.) Both men are conservatives whose careers were launched during rise of the tea party. Both are born-again Christians. And both signed the...

When Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) launched his U.S. Senate bid, he was the preferred choice of a mere 3 percent of Texas Republican primary voters in a field of a half-dozen credible candidates. Chief among his rivals was a powerful three-term lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, who possessed a net worth of $200 million, enjoyed the near-unanimous support of the Texas GOP establishment and began the 2012 election cycle with a commanding lead in the polls. A year-and-a-half later, Cruz soundly defeated Dewhurst in a primary runoff with 57 percent of the vote and was on his way to the U.S....

Ted Cruz received almost 4.5 million votes in the 2012 Texas Senate election, which he won in a landslide. Millions more Americans, outside Texas, agree with his aggressive brand of conservatism. He has been one of the most influential figures in Congress lately, and this week he became the first major candidate to announce an official 2016 presidential campaign. He also has virtually no chance of winning the Republican nomination, let alone of becoming president. So what are we in the media supposed to do about Mr. Cruz’s candidacy? He is, on the one hand, a major figure in American...

Last June, CNN’s senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin profiled Ted Cruz for The New Yorker under the headline “The Absolutist.” Now that Cruz has made his 2016 presidential campaign official, Toobin discussed the senator/candidate at length with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross on Wednesday’s show. Towards the end of their conversation, Toobin discussed what it was like to spend time with Cruz last year for a series of interviews. “Well, first of all, he’s just a very smart guy,” Toobin said, calling the former Supreme Court clerk a “law nerd” at heart. Toobin also called Cruz a “very polished speaker,” noting,...

Charles Krauthammer articulated a major hurdle that Ted Cruz will face as he runs for the presidency: First term Senators, we already tried a first-term Senator. … Cruz talks about you have to walk the walk rather than just talk the talk. You have to have done something but that's not his record in the Senate. He's a good rhetorician, but when Walker says I ran the state, I took on the unions, I took on liberals and I won I think it is going to be a strong argument. The same applies to Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. Erick...

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has announced on Monday he is going to run for president in 2016. One of the prominent leaders of the ultra-conservative wing of the Republicans, Cruz is the first politician to officially announce his candidacy. But the Tea Party controversial figure is still a question mark for the American public opinion. Ted Cruz claimed on Tuesday that his fund-raising campaign had a promising start, as the first 36 hours passed since he became a runner already brought $1 million in support of his bid. But most analysts regard the Texas senator as a marginal contender,...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) had a simple response to Fox News Channel's Megyn Kelly when she asked him whether he could win the presidency: Look at 2012. That was the year in which Cruz, then Texas's solicitor general, was elected to the Senate. “We brought together conservatives and libertarians and evangelicals and women and young people and Hispanics and Reagan Democrats,” Cruz said of that race. To which I say: Who knows? The reason for the uncertainty is that there was no exit poll in 2012 in Texas. It was one of 19 states where the broadcast networks and the...

I did … not think we’d be seeing Rand, of all people, making electability arguments at the expense of other candidates, but if there’s any guy in the field whom Democrats would demagogue more gleefully than they would him, I suppose it’s Cruz. The money line here comes when he talks about “not just throwing out red meat, but throwing out something intellectually enticing to people who haven’t been listening to our message before.” That’ll be his core attack on Cruz throughout the primaries, partly of necessity since there’s not much that divides them on policy (by Paul’s own admission)....

I was listening to Rush Limbaugh when I heard the advertisement. The voice blaring over the radio belonged to the junior senator from Texas, and he was calling for the Congress to defund ObamaCare. He was also urging listeners to donate to the Senate Conservatives Fund, an organization that’s spent millions of dollars attacking fellow Republicans for being what it deems insufficiently conservative. Ted Cruz, having burned his bridges in the Senate, now thinks his destiny lies in a race for the White House. Perhaps it does, but his assault on almost every one of his fellow Republicans during his...

Well gang, it’s officially here. It’s Presidential primary season! The festivities got off to a real bang early Monday morning with the first hat thrown conclusively into the ring. That Stetson belongs to Texas’ junior Senator and government shutdown advocator Ted Cruz. Ending months of very little suspense, Cruz tweeted “I’m running for President and I hope to earn your support!” to his 370,000 followers. In a piece entitled Ted Cruz Hopes Early Campaign Entry Will Focus Voters’ Attention, writers Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times quote longtime Republican strategist Dave Carney as saying, “It’s the...

By far, a Cruz VS Warren debate would likely be "The One" Conservatives would even pay to watch. Cruz VS Hillary would probably be the second choice. If it were to come down to Ted Cruz VS Elizabeth Warren come the fall of 2016, we all know Warren will be in a state of panic. Warren may even need to take a little extra medication before the three debates. So how would we interpret these debates? King Kong VS Ronald McDonald? Predator VS Joy Behar? or how about Mike Tyson VS James Carville? So many possibilities!

If Ted Cruz announces he is running for president on Monday, you won’t read much about it here. Even if he is serious and not, as The Daily Beast believes, only interested in drawing attention to himself, the first-term senator from Texas is not going to win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, much less the 2016 election. He is a political lightweight whose has managed to alienate just about everyone except the most reactionary of Republican activists with his bluster and sabotage. Cruz’ McCarthy-esque denunciations of his political opponents don’t suggest he’ll be able to persuade many Democrats to switch...

With the formal announcement of his presidential run on Monday, Sen. Ted Cruz officially kicks off his 2016 rivalry with fellow Republican Sen. Rand Paul.Sen. Ted Cruz will not only become the first person to officially enter the 2016 race to the White House on Monday—he will also formally kick off a new rivalry: Cruz v. Paul. When the Texas Republican launches his campaign for president at Liberty University, he will do so ahead of an upcoming electoral confrontation with Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul. Cruz and Paul are vying for the same post—the insurgent Republican frontrunner—who will eventually face...

It’s the worst kept secret in politics this weekend. Of course, when you’ve been in the eye of the media for more than a year as a possible POTUS candidate and you suddenly summon the Beltway paparazzi to your secret fortress at Liberty University on a Monday, it was going to be a tough cat to keep in the bag. Unless this is a stunt and the media elite have entirely missed the boat, Ted Cruz will skip the exploratory committee process entirely and announce his run for the White House tomorrow. Sen. Ted Cruz plans to announce Monday that...

Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report is somewhat baffled. A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll gave Republican voters a list of potential presidential candidates and asked whether the voters could support each candidate in the primaries. On that measure, Marco Rubio finished first. And yet when pollsters have asked GOP voters to name a top pick, Rubio inevitably finishes far from the top. Why is that? And why is Scott Walker doing better? Walter writes: Yet, if Rubio’s got such obvious advantages, why is he stuck in the low single digits while Walker has become a “co-frontrunner” with Bush?...

"Jeb couldn't be here today and you better be glad, 'cause it would have been $10,000 a plate. Cruz couldn't be here 'cause he's building a fence. ... Any Democrats here? You better be glad Scott Walker's not here, 'cause he would beat you up." The jokes are decent, as far as jokes about people running for president go. A little dad-ish, a little amateur, but not bad—they get at the essence of three Republican candidates, short and punchy, and not mean, per se, but also not not mean. If I was Senator Ted Cruz, and I heard myself described...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Ted Cruz today? No, try Bobby Kennedy in 1968. That’s how old the left’s doomsday rhetoric is; the actual causes come and go — pollution, acid rain, global cooling, global warming, generic climate change, whatever. The end result is that the world will soon come to end — unless we elect socialist politicians who pretend to be a cross between scientists, mystical clerics and slide rule technocrats. Or as I wrote a couple of years ago, linking to Bobby’s speech in ’68, Carter’s malaise speech a decade later, and Obama’s Dr. Strangelove-esque “science” “czar” John Holdren, “Welcome Back My Friends...

LANSING, MI -- A Republican presidential candidate hasn't won Michigan since 1988, but with 2016 on the horizon, GOP lawmakers are proposing bills that could help a second-place finisher win some electoral college votes here. • Rigging? State Rep. Cindy Gamrat, R-Plainwell, this month reintroduced legislation that would award Michigan's electoral college votes by Congressional District, ditching the winner-take-all model that most states use and diminishing the influence of large cities that can swing a vote. David Weigel of Bloomberg News, calling the bill part of the "electoral college-rigging movement," noted that Republican nominee Mitt Romney would have won nine...