Paul Begala Makes the Case for Senator Gomez

If you were to rank all of God’s creatures from the least loathsome to the most, then the Paul Begalas of the World would belong somewhere between serpents and pedophiles. (That would also be a fitting place for the Democratic strategist and CNN political contributor to spend eternity.)

 

But, on Saturday, Mr. Begala actually made a positive contribution to society. He gave Massachusetts voters a concise list of reasons (the most compelling I’ve seen) to vote for Gabriel Gomez in the upcoming special election to the U.S. Senate seat formerly occupied by John Kerry (D). Get a load of this: 

In the Senate, Democrat Ed Markey will fight alongside Massachusetts' rising star, Elizabeth Warren; Gomez would cancel her vote. Markey will support President Obama; Gomez will oppose him. Markey will stand for progressive change: an increase in the minimum wage, universal prekindergarten, tax fairness, rebuilding our roads and bridges and more. Gomez will empower obstructionist Republicans like GOP leader Mitch McConnell and the tea party extremists.

Sounds good to me. Remember, in the left-wing, business-as-usual lingo of Beltway insiders that Begala speaks fluently, members of Congress who fight for liberty and against big government oppression are "tea party extremists," Republicans who zealously represent their constituents' interests and try to stop bad policies from being enacted are "obstructionist," and "tax fairness" means "giving huge tax breaks to the president's cronies and shifting the tax burden even further onto the people who actually work for a living so that the millions of Americans who pay little or nothing in federal taxes can continue to live off the labors of others."

 

When the appropriate translation is made, Begala's pitch is also an uncharacteristically honest bit of rhetoric from him, proving my point that, on the rare occasions when Democrats tell the truth, they end up making some very persuasive arguments for voters to vote Republican.

The Obama-Nixon Comparison Is Indeed Appropriate

Steve Chapman, the Chicago Tribune columnist and editorial writer whose semiweekly musings range from the sentient to the delusional, has convinced me that the comparison of Obama to the late President Nixon is not only justified but apt. How? Well, take a look at this from his latest column:  

In recent days, those people have triumphantly likened Barack Obama to Richard Nixon, particularly on the misuse of the Internal Revenue Service for political advantage. In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon because, among other reasons, he tried to cause "income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner."

This, of course, is exactly what the IRS now admits doing when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny. The Treasury Department's Inspector General found, "The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions."

The misconduct happened under the current president. Therefore, Obama = Nixon.

Makes sense to me, except for that "Obama = Nixon” part. The two presidents may be guilty of similar acts, but they’re not the same man. (I recently tweeted my displeasure at the profligate comparisons of Obama to Nixon; people shouldn’t speak so ill of the dead.)

 

Chapman then explains that he was just setting up a straw man. Equating the two “is like concluding that babies are like poisonous snakes because some of them have rattles." Nice one, Steve, and were that hackneyed quip the worst part of your column, I wouldn’t have been moved to write this post, but then you say, "Maybe information will someday emerge to confirm the conservative suspicion that Obama thuggishly subverted the IRS to win re-election, but so far, it falls in the realm of make-believe."

 

I’d say it falls in the category of “undiscovered evidence,” the kind that warrants a dedicated, persistent and earnest congressional investigation and the appointment of an independent counsel. Chapman did at least review the history of how Nixon used tax agents as political operatives, but then he went way out on a limb with his assertion that, in "the case of Obama, there is no evidence that he or his Treasury Secretary was aware of the mistreatment of conservative groups -- much less that either of them requested it."

 

Well, here's what we do know: According to The Associated Press: 

Many conservative groups complained during the 2012 election that they were being harassed by the IRS. They accused the agency of frustrating their attempts to become tax exempt by sending them lengthy, intrusive questionnaires.
 
The forms, which the groups have made available, sought information about group members' political activities, including details of their postings on social networking websites and about family members.
 
In some cases, the IRS acknowledged, agents inappropriately asked for lists of donors.
 
There has been a surge of politically active groups claiming tax-exempt status in recent elections -- conservative and liberal. Among the highest profile are Republican Karl Rove's group Crossroads GPS and the liberal Moveon.org.
 
These groups claim tax-exempt status under section 501 (c) (4) of the federal tax code, which is for social welfare groups. Unlike other charitable groups, these organizations are allowed to participate in political activities, but their primary activity must be social welfare.
 
That determination is up to the IRS.
 
The number of groups filing for this tax-exempt status more than doubled from 2010 to 2012, to more than 3,400. To handle the influx, the IRS centralized its review of these applications in an office in Cincinnati.

The IRS agents in Cincinnati reportedly came up with a list of things to look for in an application, including the words "tea party" and "patriot." Donors to conservative groups and Republican candidates were harassed, audited and elderly. (Their age is not the IRS's fault, but it is a common trait I've noticed among the conservative/Republican victims of the Obama Administration's witch hunt.) 

Lois Lerner, who runs the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, knew about the targeting of Tea Party groups as early as June 29, 2011, according to the Inspector General's draft report released last week. On Aug. 4, 2011, staffers in the IRS's Rulings & Agreements office "held a meeting with chief counsel so that everyone would have the latest information on the issue." This raises the question of whether then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman perjured himself at a hearing before the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight on March 22, 2012, when he testified, "There's absolutely no targeting." (This was in response to Rep. Charles Boustany's question, "Can you give us assurances that the IRS is not targeting particular groups based on political leanings?") Yesterday, Shulman testified before the Senate Finance Committee that he learned “sometime in the spring of 2012″ that “there was a list that was being used” to identify political groups for further review and that the term “tea party” was on the list. That may have also been a lie, but assuming for the moment it was true, Shulman did not immediately (or even shortly thereafter) notify the subcommittee of this. Rather, he left a false impression with Congress and the public until this month, when he finally corrected the record. However, if "everyone" means "everyone," then it means that Shulman was clued into the targeting well before he testified to the contrary. Not surprisingly, Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself today in a hearing before the House Committee on Oversight. 

   

As for whether the president and his Treasury Secretary personally knew about this misconduct, here's some "evidence" for Steve Chapman. The White House coordinated with the Treasury Department over "how the IRS would disclose its targeting of conservative groups." And, the White House was caught in another lie on Monday, when Jay Carney acknowledged that, contrary to what he had previously told the press corps, Senior legal Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was told on April 24 about the IRS audit that showed tax officials unfairly targeted Tea Party groups and that she then told White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough "and other senior officials" about the investigation.

So, Steve is wrong about there being "no evidence" that the Secretary of the Treasury knew about the mistreatment of conservative groups, but the rest of that sentence is correct--if by "evidence" he actually means direct evidence that has come out. Circumstantial evidence of the president's culpability in this affair is mounting every day. Let's not forget that it took a considerable while after the Watergate burglary in June 1972 for evidence of Nixon's personal involvement in the cover-up to surface. The fallout from this particular scandal is still in its larval stage. If there's any talk on this subject that falls "in the realm of make-believe," then it's coming from those who are scoffing at and deriding the notion that President Obama's hands are clean in all this. Stay tuned.

Convention Issues: Democratic Deficiencies and Republicans' Tough Choices

This past week, a POLITICO article by Mike Allen caught my eye. According to Allen, President Obama's advisers “are scripting a Democratic National Convention featuring several Republicans in a prime-time appeal to independents — and planning a blistering portrayal of Mitt Romney as a heartless aristocrat who 'would devastate the American middle class.'”

One wonders how such a divisive attack, with no basis in reality, would "appeal to independents," but that aside, showcasing members of another party who support the president is a familiar, and typically beneficial, tactic. We've become used to seeing a handful of "crossover endorsements"--prominent figures affiliated with one political party who endorse the other party's nominee--in each presidential election, and it's not uncommon for each party to feature at least one such speaker at their national convention. (The most glaring example of the last generation has to be then-Sen. Zell Miller's keynote address at the 2004 Republican National Convention.) Remember Sen. Joe Lieberman's impassioned speech to the Republican National Convention in 2008? The use of this tactic this year, however, presents both parties with different problems.

Republicans' Embarrassment of Riches

Giving a well-known Democrat a a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention has become a tradition in presidential-election years, but this election cycle presents the RNC with a predicament they've not faced, at least not to this extent, in a long time: With so many rising stars and erudite "young guns" and a limited amount of time in which to showcase them (to a large audience), who gets picked? We can already count on seeing/hearing speeches from Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Rob Portman (Ohio), Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) and Rand Paul (R-KY), Govs. Mary Fallin (Okla.), Nikki Haley (SC), John Kasich (Ohio), Susana Martinez (N.M.), Rick Scott (Fla.), Bob McDonnell (VA) and Bobby Jindal (La.), former Gov. Mike Huckabee (AR) and Jeb Bush (Fla.), former Sen. and 2012 presidential contender Rick Santorum, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and U.S. Senate candidates Ted Cruz and Connie Mack, and of course New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will deliver the keynote address, but what of Rep. Allen West (R., Fla.), the GOP congressman and conservative rock star? Anyone who's seen West address a crowd should know he's a dynamic, engaging speaker. Ditto Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), though I suppose her firebrand persona may detract from her effectiveness as a spokeswoman. There's also the question of whether Speaker Boehner will address the convention; surely the highest-ranking Republican in the federal government, a man who's third in line for the presidency under the 25th Amendment, ought to be at least offered a prominent role at the Republican National Convention. For that matter, what about our party elders? Thus far, neither President Bush has been slated to speak, at least not publicly (although I would understand if the elder Bush has tired of the more festive side of politics and would prefer to just enjoy his retirement in peace and quiet), nor has Newt Gingrich, which kind of makes sense, but why would you have Santorum speak and not Newt? (If it's because Santorum is the designated red-meat-thrower to social conservatives in a convention that will be focused on economic issues, then I get it.)

With so many speakers already lined up and (hopefully) more announcements to come, I wondered if the committee would have room--or make room--for a Democrat. My query was answered when I learned that former Rep. Artur Davis (D., Ala.), who co-chaired President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and ran (unsuccessfully) for governor of Alabama in 2010, would be speaking at the Convention in Tampa. Of course, Davis technically is no longer a Democrat; in May, he officially switched to the Republican Party and endorsed Mitt Romney.

Democrats' Delusions

Despite their high-minded ideas for convention speakers, Democrats may have some trouble finding a prominent Republican (or former Republican) counterweight to Davis; according to Allen, they have designs on a couple former Senators and maybe a man in uniform:

Convention planners are considering featuring a centrist Republican leader on at least two of the three nights. Nightly remotes from swing states may include a CEO or “major Republican.” On Wednesday night, a “notable GOP woman” is among the possible participants. And on the final night, Democrats may include a Republican leader — someone like former Sens. John Warner or Chuck Hagel — or a GOP woman.

“This segment would speak directly to independents, noting we are all ‘Americans first,’ ” the documents say. “Depending on the speaker’s background, the President’s military accomplishments might be highlighted.”

Thursday also may include a former military leader, perhaps paired with a former enlisted man or woman. “Ideally they would have witnessed first-hand the difficult decisions [Obama has] made,” the documents say. “A Republican leader would be ideal.”

Unfortunately for Democrats, John Warner has made clear that he will “continue” the path he charted upon leaving the Senate in 2009 to follow “a traditional Virginia ‘golden silence’ as regards politics at all levels.” Hagel is more of a wild card; despite having a pretty conservative voting record in his twelve years on the Hill, the irascible Nebraskan curiously refused to endorse his colleague and fellow Vietnam veteran John McCain in the 2008 election; he later joined the Obama Administration and endorsed Joe Sestak (D), the very left-wing Democratic congressman, in his (unsuccessful) 2010 U.S. Senate bid. Still, he has yet to make an endorsement in this race, though he has repeatedly praised Obama and made some bizarre comments about the Republican Party.

Allen's Politico piece also underscored how Democrats may be setting themselves up for a disappointment--or even a disaster--in planning this year's convention. According to what Allen calls "convention planning documents," one objective of the convention will be, “Tell the story of the President’s accomplishments — the auto rescue, manufacturing, ending the war, health care, energy — as central to his fight for the middle class and America’s long-term economic strength.”

This shows that the Democrats charged with planning and organizing the convention are either (1) deluded about President Obama's record or (2) planning a convention marked by blatant lies and propaganda. One wonders what "accomplishments" on manufacturing, health care and energy the Dems are planning to tout, but I seized on that "ending the war" line; as I opined back in June, President Obama's credit-grabbing for ending the war in Iraq has crossed the line from shameless to offensive. The evidence is iron-clad that he deserves no credit for "ending the war," and if this were a bigger issue, then I'd expect Republicans to make a bigger deal about it.

Similarly, there's this:

Aiming to connect the cerebral Obama with average Americans — and thus emphasize one of Romney’s most notable weaknesses — the convention will try to portray the president as “driven by the same values we have, because he’s faced the same struggles.”

Yes, I think we can all empathize with the struggles Obama had faced. Remember when you were trying to decide which elective courses to register for during your second year at Harvard Law School? Or that agonizing heartburn you suffered after eating your first dog? Remember when you had to throw your spiritual mentor and longtime friend under the bus once he became a political liability, or how hard you've had to work to distract people from the terrible economy your disastrous policies have created?

Sardonic wit aside, notice how Obama is "cerebral" (Allen's word), whereas "one of Romney’s most notable weaknesses" has to do with connecting with people. (It's not Obama's fault he can't connect with voters! He's just too smart for most of those ignorant hicks!) Allen details other ill-conceived marketing ideas:   

The convention’s broad themes depict Romney as “an exemplar of [the] bust-and-boom economy,” while “Obama led us through the darkest days of the deepest recession in generations. … Now he’s fighting for the next steps, so we do more than recover from a deep recession that was a long time in the making, and reclaim America’s promise on behalf of hard-workers, the strivers, the dreamers, who ask only for a fair shot and a fair shake.”

By Democratic standards, that's pretty clever. When your party's candidate made the bad economy he inherited worse, that needn't be a negative; just emphasize how your guy "led us through the darkest days of the deepest recession in generations" (hoping most people don't know the definition of "generations"). I have to admit, I do like that part about Obama "fighting ... on behalf of hard-workers, the strivers, the dreamers, who ask only for a fair shot and a fair shake."

Yeah, it's about damn time we had someone who will fight for the monied interests and coastal elites! Who will speak for the Solyndras, the union bosses, the radical environmentalists? Who but Obama will keep crony capitalism alive and prevent the spiggot showering GE and other favored enterprises with federal tax dollars from being turned off by those awful, austerity-minded fiscal conservatives? Okay, maybe Elizabeth Warren, but she's not running for president.

The "TEA Party"/"Washington Insider" Overlap

For nearly four years now the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party has been a force in American politics. Granted, in its cradle, it was barely a ripple in a sea of money, incumbents, special interests and power elites, but by 2010 it grown into a massive tidal wave that swept out incumbents of both parties, in national, state and local races, in primary and general elections.

After such a showing in the 2010 election cycle, whatever modest activity the TEA Party could generate in the off-year elections of 2011 would seem to be a letdown, but the grassroots activists and deep-pocketed donors who joined forces in '10 really spent much of last year gearing up for the next big round of elections in 2012, when they would get the opportunity to show their strength in a presidential election.

No candidate for president this year was able to win over TEA Partiers en masse (not even Ron Paul, the so-called "godfather" of the movement), but the TEA Party was able to score a historic win in arguably the second-most important election this year when they helped Wisconsin Gov. and champion of the taxpayer Scott Walker (R) survive a recall election, the first governor in U.S. history to pull off such a feat, and they proved critical to the upset victories of Nebraska State Sen. Deb Fischer, Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock and former Texas Solicitor Gen. Ted Cruz in their respective U.S. Senate primaries this year. In Indiana, certainly, anti-Washington sentiment played a role in the downfall of six-term Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN) in May and a smattering of other entrenched incumbents in congressional races two years ago. Disdain for politicians who have been in Congress so long that they succumb to that awful mentality that manifests itself in the form of reckless deficit spending, backroom deal-making and that insufferable I-know-best hautere has fueled the TEA Party since its genesis in the Winter of '08-'09. The tactics of branding a candidate with the epithet of "Washington insider" and campaigning as an "outsider" predate the TEA Party movement but have proven effective in advancing so-called "TEA Party candidates".

Of course, every once in a while, we are reminded that there is some crossover between Washington "insiders" and the TEA Party. There are constant reminders, such as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and the aforementioned Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), as well as various TEA-Party-affiliated groups like FreedomWorks founded and/or run by former members of Congress. Take last night's primary election results, for example: Four states held primary elections yesterday: Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Washington. In two--Michigan and Missouri--Republicans chose their candidates to take on vulnerable Democratic incumbents in hotly contested Senate races (Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) is also up for re-election this year but faces a considerably less daunting challenge.), and in both, they nominated candidates who had spent over a decade in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In Michigan, former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, whose 2010 bid for governor had floundered, handily defeated a slew of weaker candidates and will take on two-term Sen. Debbie Stabenow in the general election. Hoekstra, a Dutch immigrant and former Herman Miller executive, represented Michigan's 2nd congressional district (a shard of the lower peninsula along Lake Michigan's eastern shore) for eighteen years. Last month, some super PAC called Prosperity for Michigan released an ad attacking Hoekstra for "voting for millions in earmarks, raising his own pay, adding trillions to the debt" and "raising the debt ceiling repeatedly." This stupid waste of money failed to propel the group's favored candidate, Clark Durant, to victory in the primary and may have just weakened Hoekstra's chances of winning the Senate seat.

Republicans are better positioned to knock off Sen. Claire McCaskill in Missouri. McCaskill won her seat by a razor-thin margin in 2006 and is arguably the most vulnerable U.S. senator running for re-election this year, so it's no surprise there was a spirited contest in the GOP primary. The TEA Party splintered in that race, and the result was victory for Rep. Todd Akin, who has represented Missouri's 2nd congressional district (west of St. Louis) since 2001. (Interesting factoid: Akin's predecessor in the House, Jim Talent, was elected to the U.S. Senate and lost his re-election bid to McCaskill.) Akin's win came as a disappointment to supporters of former Missouri State Treasurer Sarah Steelman, who were hoping for a younger, more attractive nominee, and the family of businessman John Brunner, who spent over $7 million of his own personal fortune on his failed campaign. The latest polls out of the Show Me State have Akin leading McCaskill, albeit within their margins of error.

So, is being a "Washington insider" not the political liability it used to be? Of course not, but this week's primaries show that a candidate can convince voters he's the right choice to take on an entrenched incumbent senator and really change Washington, even if he's been in Washington just as long as--or, in the cases of Hoekstra and Akin, longer than--his opponent...

Fowl Play

I wanted to write about Ted Cruz's upset victory in the Republican primary runoff for U.S. Senate in Texas today, but the big news of the day seems to be this Chick-fil-A thing. This is my blog, however, so I'm quite content to post about the former. However, out of appreciation for Mike Huckabee and all the great Americans who stood for tolerance today by patronizing Chick-fil-A, I titled this post with the best, most a propos pun we could come up with after five minutes of brainstorming, and that will have to suffice for the other story.

Now, then, Ted Cruz is going to be the next U.S. Senator from Texas! Hooray!! That being said, our former state solicitor general's win last night over Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst was nothing short of remarkable; at one time, Cruz was polling as low as 1% in the Republican primary. I blogged a bit about his gradually rising wave of support back in May, after he finished a strong second to Dewhurst in the primary. It seems a tad inappropriate to describe his meteoric rise as "slow and steady", but that's what his poll numbers indicated, at least until this summer. After outperforming his poll position in the May 29 primary (winning 34% of the statewide vote to Dewhurst's 45%), Cruz shot up in the polls while Dewhurst sank; a Public Policy Polling survey put him ahead of the lieutenant governor, 49% to 44%, in mid-July, a stunning reversal of fortune for both men over a relatively short period of time. (59% of respondents in a PPP poll taken before the primary in May said that they would vote for Dewhurst if the race came down to a runoff between the two, while just 34% would support Cruz.)

So, what happened? The results of the PPP surveys provide some clues. In May, 61% of the 482 likely Republican primary voters PPP surveyed reported having a "favorable" opinion of Dewhurst; only 25% viewed him unfavorably. By July, the percentage of Republican primary voters in Texas who viewed Dewhurst favorably was down to 52%, while 33% of those polled had an unfavorable opinion of the former frontrunner. His favorability rating slid down slightly to 50% in the poll released Sunday, but his unfavorability was up to 39%. Cruz, meanwhile, actually enjoyed a decline in the percentage of voters who had an unfavorable opinion of him (something we don't often see), from 32% in May to 25% in July. (His unfavolrabe rating returned to 32% in the final PPP poll, but by then a clear majority of Texas Republicans viewed him favorably.) What's really impressive is the contemporaneous surge in Cruz's popularity; in the May poll, only 38% of respondents said they had a favorable opinion of him; in the survey results released Sunday, that number was 53%. So, to recap, in a little over two months, Dewhurst saw his favorable/unfavorable gap shrink from 36 percentage points to eleven, while Cruz saw his grow from six to 21 percentage points. This was likely the result of a combination of many different things, but I can tell you that I heard from or about a lot of voters who were motivated to vote for Cruz in the runoff because of the negative attack ads against him, especially one run by the Texas Conservatives Fund, a group I had never heard of before last month, in which some broad whose son allegedly committed suicide after his release from a for-profit juvenile detention center says, "Ted Cruz should be absolutely ashamed of himself." (It seems Cruz represented Robert Mericle, a real estate developer who was linked to a bribery scandal, in an unrelated civil suit.) One female voter, herself a mother of two, expressed her disgust not only for the gutter-politics tone of the ad but also at the woman's conspicuous failure to accept personal responsibility for her son's fate.

Cruz's victory is significant for a number of reasons, not least because winning the Republican primary for a stadewide race in Texas is tantamount to getting elected, but Dewhurst's defeat will likely also have consequences beyond this year. He'll likely never attain higher office; his win-at-all-costs strategy cost him almost all the goodwill he had built up with the Texas GOP, and the voters who supported Cruz in the primary aren't likely to forgive him--at least not anytime soon--for his vicious attacks and dishonest charges. He may win another term as lieutenant governor if he choses to run again, but he'll never be governor; if he tries to run, then the same forces that did him in this time will combine to defeat him again. He may not even run again; the man turns 67 years old this month, and his reputation has taken a considerable hit. As for me, I'm going to scarf down some waffle fries and upload that picture of me with Texas's next Senator to Facebook.

Are Texas Republicans As Smart As Florida Voters?

Left: An image of Marco Rubio from his days as Speaker of the Florida
House of Representatives graced the cover of National Review in
September of 2009. Right: Former Texas Solicitor Gen. Ted Cruz, a
Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, made the cover of National
Review last October. (Composite Photo)

Here's a story: A handsome, young, Cuban-American lawyer makes a long-shot bid for a U.S. Senate seat. He has impeccable conservative credentials and a captivating personal story, being the son of Cuban immigrants, but he doesn't have the name recognition or fundraising machinery of his main competition in the Republican primary, an affable, if slightly dull, power broker who has held elected office continuously for over a decade. Slowly but surely, he cultivates an enthusiastic grassroots base and attracts a lot of out-of-state attention (and money). The media brands him "the TEA Party candidate" in the race, a label he doesn't shy away from. In time, he's the toast of talk radio, the hottest subject in conservative circles and a real threat to the GOP "establishment". He's still an underdog, but not like he once was. Voters across the state latch on to his message of a smaller, more efficient, more responsible government. What was once dismissed as the quixotic quest of a far-right gadfly is soon recognized as the latest dark-horse candidacy in a pivotal election year.
 

In case it's not obvious, I'm talking about Ted Cruz, the former Texas solicitor general who is vying for retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's Senate seat, but the preceding paragraph could have just as easily been written about Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), back when he was Senate candidate Marco Rubio, the underdog in the 2010 Florida Republican primary for U.S. Senator. Given Cruz's heritage, the tenor of his campaign and the dynamics of his primary battle with Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R), it's not surprising that he's drawn comparisons to the freshman U.S. Senator who's now being touted as arguably the best choice for vice president on the Republican ticket, and the editors of National Review had to know that the comparisons would only continue after Cruz's visage graced the cover of their magazine last fall.

Last October, National Review gave Ted Cruz the Marco Rubio treatment, making him the subject of the cover story in their October 17 issue. Just over two years earlier, the magazine had done the same with Rubio, who at the time was trailing then-Gov. Charlie Crist in Republican primary polls by double digits.

“I’m not Don Quixote here,” Rubio was quoted as saying in the article. “This campaign embodies everything you’re hearing at the town halls.”

Like Rubio, Cruz thrives at town hall events, revving up the crowd with his enthusiastic prose--heavy on policy and light on pie-in-the-sky campaign pablum--before taking questions from individual attendees. Unlike Rubio, however, he had more than one primary foe to dispatch, and neither Dewhurst nor former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert had the kind of weaknesses that brought down Crist's campaign. Nonetheless, in the primary on Tuesday, Cruz was able to finish a strong second to Dewhurst, who failed to break the 50% threshold necessary to avoid a runoff.

Cruz is still the underdog; the results of at least one poll conducted before the primary indicated that Dewhurst would prevail over Cruz in a runoff by a wide margin (25 points). Don't expect that to discourage him, however; the 34.2% of the vote he managed to get in the first round of voting exceeded his showing in every poll of the race. There's other things that will work in his favor, too: runoffs tend to favor those candidates with the more excited--i.e., motivated--base. (Cruz's advantage here may be overtold, though. In the primary, Dewhurst fared slightly better and Cruz did slightly worse among early voters, a key indicator of voter enthusiasm.) Cruz also has two whole months from today to campaign, though my sources tell me both candidates' campaign coffers have been depleted, and only one of them has a nine-figure net worth.

The margin between Dewhurst's and Cruz's vote totals--just over ten percentage points--supports multiple inferences. On the one hand, it was a lot smaller than polls had been suggesting. On the other, it means that Dewhurst has a much smaller gap to close than does Cruz. Still, history tells us that the first-place finisher in the primary is by no means a shoo-in in the runoff; in the 2002 U.S. Senate race, Victor Morales edged out Ron Kirk in the Democratic primary, but Kirk won the runoff by twenty percentage points. To use a more recent example from our next-door neighbor, Bobby Jindal finished fifteen points ahead of then-Lt. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco in the first round of the 2003 Louisiana governor's race, only to lose the runoff to her, 52%-48%, in a shocking upset. (Funny story: Blanco turned out to be such an awful governor that she didn't even run for re-election in 2007, and Jindal handily won the governorship that year without a runoff.)

Of course, the 2010 U.S. Senate election in Florida wasn't decided by the Republican primary, as this race will be; after seeing his double-digit lead lead in the polls turn into a double-digit deficit, Crist made what in retrospect may have been a career-ending blunder: he dropped out of the GOP primary and continued his candidacy as an independent. Florida voters saw this opportunistic stunt for what it was, and Rubio trounced Crist by nineteen points (winning 49% of the vote to Crist's 30%) in the general election. 

In Dewhurst, Cruz does not have a challenger as flawed as Charlie Crist, but he does have a strong message that has resonated with a growing mass of Texas voters. He's also got a nationwide fundraising apparatus and endorsements from just about every influential conservative who's not currently holding public office. This July, Texas voters have a choice: we can settle for the "sufficiently conservative" or "conservative enough" (or whatever Dewhurst's backers consider him) candidate, or we can send a younger, more erudite (and, I would argue, more conservative), passionate advocate to Washington and add to a burgeoning bloc of young, bold congressional Republicans resolved to effect major structural reforms in the near future, if only they could get the reinforcements they need. In 2010, Floridians chose the latter. Will Texans show they have at least as much sense as voters on the other side of the Gulf?

Romney vs. Paul Would Make Long, Protracted Primary Fight Worth It

AP File Photo

As the focus of the race for the 2012 GOP nomination turns t0 South Carolina, two apparent realities cannot be ignored: (1) Mitt Romney has the nomination all but locked up, and (2) Ron Paul must be taken seriously as a presidential contender. At least one of these will no doubt be hard to swallow for many Republican faithful, but acceptance of reality is a necessary characteristic of any true Republican in our country today. The facts are thus: Mitt Romney placed first in both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and he's leading all the national polls in the race for the GOP nomination. He also leads every poll I've seen out of South Carolina in recent days. Other than Romney, the only Republican to break 20% in both Iowa and New Hampshire so far this cycle is Ron Paul. None of this is up for debate. Now, what can we gleam from these facts?

What I've concluded is that Mitt Romney is going to be our nominee in the general election (barring his sudden death or some other unforseen act of God), and Ron Paul is not the loony-tune fringe candidate he was four years ago. If you're just going by vote totals so far, then Dr. Paul is the only candidate who should be regarded as a credible, serious challenger to Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination. Yet, he is the only one of the five alternatives who is not. Why? Many reasons, not all of which warrant mention here. I personally would not want our party to nominate someone who voted against the Patriot Act and still opposes it to this day, who declined to state that he would have authorized the Navy SEALs to kill Osama bin Laden, and who wants to get rid of the Federal Reserve. (The continued existence of the Fed is a debate worth having, but suffice it to say for now that I don't want to go back to the time when "panics" were a routine occurrence.) Nevertheless, there are substantive disagreements I have with at least one position taken by each of the candidates for president this year. I'm sure most Republicans feel the same way.

This brings me to my thesis du jour: if the race for the Republican nomination were to quickly come down to a two-man contest between two candidates who both had a realistic path to the nomination, then a Romney-Paul showdown would be the only protracted primary battle worth having. Think about it: An existensial debate, not just over the platform of the GOP in the 21st Century, but about the issues that will no doubt be litigated in the general election: the role of government in people's lives, the role of the U.S. on the world stage, how best to prosecute the War on Terror, how soon and how deeply to cut federal spending. Wouldn't that be more exciting (and more intellectually satisfying) than this hackneyed tripe about "vulture capitalism" or Super-PACs?

As ferociously as the Paul campaign has gone after his opponents, he rightfully came to Mitt Romney's defense after the others piled on him over his record as CEO of Bain Capital. This was just the latest example of Paul's maturity as a candidate and the Bohemian approach that has always characterized his campaign style. Romney, too, has refrained from the petty politics of drive-by attacks aimed at scoring cheap political points; he hasn't addressed Newt Gingrich's various personal transgressions, Rick Santorum's borderline-homophobic remarks or Rick Perry's obvious lack of ... well, let's just say "book smarts". He did take a cheap shot (in my opinion) at Jon Huntsman for the latter's service as Ambassador to China, but this was far from the ad hominem attacks that the others have engaged in.

A fervent, extended primary fight between Ron and Romney would be good for our party and our country. Sadly, it is not to be. Right-wing Genius out!