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Title: Ted Talks, But It Doesn't Mean Anything
Source:
The Atlantic online
URL Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics ... t-doesnt-mean-anything/479148/
Published: Apr 20, 2016
Author: Peter Bienart
Post Date: 2016-04-21 12:38:05 by nolu chan
Keywords: None
Views: 979
Comments: 7
Ted Talks, But It Doesn't Mean Anything Ted Cruz once had an ideology. After being trounced in New York, all he has left is gibberish. Peter Bienart Ted Cruz has a problem. Since he launched his campaign for president at Liberty University more than a year ago, he has aimed to consolidate the right. He has largely succeeded. He has vanquished Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, and Carly Fiorina, and now he enjoys the overwhelming support of movement conservatives. His problem is that he trails Donald Trump anyway. And in its final months, the 2016 campaign is moving to a series of states—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, California, Washington, Oregon—where movement conservatives aren’t so numerous. In primary states with more moderate Republican electorates, Cruz has gotten crushed. He won less than 10 percent of the vote in Massachusetts and Vermont. He won less than 15 percent in New York. So last night, Cruz changed his message. He’s no longer running as Mr. Conservative. He’s running as an outsider, a healer, and the voice of generational change. Judging by his speech last night, it won’t be easy. Cruz began the speech by talking about “towns and faces that have been weathered with trouble, joblessness, and fear” and “factories that are closing.” The people suffering this economic distress, Cruz explained, “have made it clear. They cry out for a new path. This is the year of the outsider. I’m an outsider. Bernie Sanders is an outsider. Both with the same diagnosis. But both with very different paths to healing.” This borders on gibberish. First, Cruz is declaring himself an outsider at the very moment he has stopped being one. In state after state, the Republican establishment is rallying around him in an effort to stop Trump. That’s why Cruz is destroying Trump in the insider’s game of selecting delegates. Second, Cruz and Sanders most definitely do not share the “same diagnosis” of what ails the American economy. Sanders thinks the problem is too little government. Cruz thinks problem is too much government. The reason many voters angered by joblessness and factory closings are choosing Sanders is because he promises to use government to save their jobs—free markets be damned. He’ll end the trade deals they hate and disempower the billionaires who promote them. Trump promises aggressive government action, too: He’ll renegotiate trade deals and seal the border. Cruz, by contrast, has tailored his economic message to the hedge-fund managers and energy tycoons who fund his campaign. Finally, the idea that Cruz and Sanders offer “paths to healing” is bizarre. Cruz’s ultra-partisanship repeatedly brought the federal government to the brink of shutdown. Sanders promises a political “revolution.” That’s not healing. It’s ideological total war. After comparing himself to Sanders, Cruz then compared himself to Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. “Ronald Reagan and Jack Kennedy were outsiders,” he declared. “They both represented a whole new vision and vibrancy, a new generation of ideas. Jack Kennedy looked forward instead of back to the first half-century of World War. He knew that America could dream and build if we were set free—not tanks for war, but rockets for exploration. Reagan looked out to us, the most powerful force for innovation that the world has ever known. There we found new tech pioneers like Bill Gates and a young Steve Jobs.” More gibberish. Except for his Catholicism, Kennedy was hardly an outsider. When he ran for president, he had already served 14 years in Congress. His father had been Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. As for the idea that he promised, “not tanks for war, but rockets for exploration,” that’s wrong, too. Kennedy didn’t campaign on sending a man to the moon in 1960. He mostly promised rockets for war. One of his key pledges was to erase the “missile gap” that he falsely claimed existed between the United States and the Soviet Union. And the line about Reagan, Gates, and Jobs? It’s word salad. Cruz doesn’t say Reagan actually did anything to enable the innovations of Microsoft or Apple. How could he have? Both companies were founded during the Ford presidency. Cruz merely says that Reagan “looked out to us,” and “there we found” Gates and Jobs. In other words, Reagan was conscious that he governed a lot of people, and during his presidency, many of those people began buying the products that Gates and Jobs sold. Inspiring. “Now it’s our turn,” Cruz continued, in full JFK-mode. “This generation must first to look inward, to see who we really are. After years of being beaten down, years of being told we couldn’t, shouldn’t, or wouldn’t, this generation needs to answer a new set of questions: Can We? Should We? Will We?” OK, but can we, should we, will we … what? The new, post-ideological Cruz doesn’t say. When he ran as a conservative, the Texas senator brimmed with edgy policy proposals: repeal Obamacare, repeal gay marriage, repeal the Iran nuclear deal, ban abortion, deny citizenship to undocumented immigrants. All that’s gone now, replaced by pure wind. His generation of Americans, Cruz informed us last night, will “restore our spirit … free our minds and our imagination … create a new and better world … bring back jobs and freedom and security … live as neighbors, friends, and family, in peace, once again … restore our rightful place in the world … change the world through the hope of freedom’s enduring promise and our unrelenting spirit,” whatever that means. Then, near the speech’s end, came the strangest analogy of all: Cruz not as Sanders, Reagan, or Kennedy—but as Pope Francis. “We have so much that binds us together: our families, our work ethic, our ability to dream and build unlike any people in history,” Cruz declared. “But most of all our charity, our love for our fellow men and women, and our willingness to sacrifice for those in need … We will heal the sick, feed the poor, and defend the defenseless.” Huh? The Pope just took several refugee families to live with him at the Vatican. For his part, Cruz proposed banning Syrian Muslim refugees from entering the United States and deporting those America had already let in. The Pope has called inequality, “the root of social evil.” According to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Cruz’s tax plan would cut taxes dramatically for the richest 1 percent of Americans while raising them for the poorest 20 percent. It’s hard to see all this working. Cruz is not a healer. He’s not a champion of the poor. He doesn’t even come across as particularly youthful. (The New York Times noted last year that, Cruz is “just a few months older than [Marco] Rubio, but no readers or political commentators that we could find have made an issue of his age.) He’s an articulate, ambitious, uncompromising, life-long conservative. He has been giving speeches on Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek since high school. Take the conservatism out of Ted Cruz and you’re left with what he delivered in his speech last night: nonsensical mush.
The Atlantic
April 20, 2016
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#1. To: All (#0)
This is true . Trump and Sanders are both big government statists . "If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools." Plato
I'm not sure that Teddy understands that he can't get a do over on this. This tops his NY values fumble. The guy doesn't seem to learn.
потому что Бог хочет это тот путь
This is pretty stupid. Si vis pacem, para bellum Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who don't Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. There are no Carthaginian terrorists. President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. --Clint Eastwood "I am concerned for the security of our great nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within." -- General Douglas MacArthur
Cruz has never really said anything but, I want to be president.
If he says nothing stupid or outrageous, nobody would pay attention to him. The debate brilliance of Ted Cruz did not work so well against Austan Goolsbee. Ted Cruz Showed Eloquence, and Limits, as Debater at Princeton By Jason Horowitz [excerpt] Instead of the regular practice of defending his proposed topic — the merits of mind-reading — Mr. Cruz let his adversaries choose which side to argue. But the tactic, intended to highlight his confidence, backfired. As he waited for them to decide, the two Harvard students conspicuously dithered, eating up Mr. Cruz’s allotted speaking time as they whispered and searched their pockets for a coin to flip. The audience, now on to the stalling tactic, chuckled as Mr. Cruz snapped: “Gentlemen! You must have decided by now.” But he and his partner never recovered, and the national championship for which he had worked so hard went to someone else. http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/08/21/ted_cruz_on_the_princeton_debate_circuit.html Ted Couldn't Help Himself From Taking the Shots By Emma Roller [excerpt] "Austan can be very, very funny. He kept challenging Ted to shoot the ball from outlandishly long places—'I bet you $20 you can't make a shot from right here,' " Gray said. "Austan would bait Ted to shoot, shoot, shoot, and it was not a good result for him. ... Ted couldn’t help himself from taking the shots." Princeton lost the game.
But he says it with great conviction. And God chose him. And his fundraising email said, "I'm on the verge of victory."
#2. To: nolu chan (#0)
(Edited)
Second, Cruz and Sanders most definitely do not share the “same diagnosis” of what ails the American economy. Sanders thinks the problem is too little government. Cruz thinks problem is too much government. The reason many voters angered by joblessness and factory closings are choosing Sanders is because he promises to use government to save their jobs—free markets be damned. He’ll end the trade deals they hate and disempower the billionaires who promote them. Trump promises aggressive government action, too: He’ll renegotiate trade deals and seal the border.
#3. To: nolu chan (#1)
#4. To: SOSO (#3)
" This tops his NY values fumble. "
#5. To: nolu chan (#0)
Ted Talks, But It Doesn't Mean Anything
#6. To: Stoner (#4)
This is pretty stupid.
New York Times
April 22, 2015 PRINCETON, N.J. — By the time he was a senior at Princeton University in 1992, Ted Cruz had developed an arsenal of rhetorical skills and theatrical gestures that made him one of the most polished performers on the college debate circuit. So when he reached the quarterfinals of the national championships at M.I.T., with the title that had eluded him so far now in sight, he decided to try to knock his Harvard opponents off balance with one of his favorite tricks.
Slate
Aug. 21 2013 11:49 AM Cruz competed against and lost to former White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee in the American Parliamentary Debate Association's 1991 Team of the Year contest. (Cruz went on to win in 1992.) Goolsbee's debate partner, David Gray, recalled that after beating Cruz and his partner, David Panton, one team challenged the other to a pickup basketball game. As Gray remembers it, Goolsbee was matched up to guard Cruz, and proceeded to trash-talk Cruz up and down the court.
#7. To: rlk (#5)
Cruz has never really said anything but, I want to be president.
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