Cowardly Republicans betray again.
Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stages a vote the day before a primary it will hardly rate mention with all media focused on campaign rallies. Then McConnell joins six other GOP turncoats in backing confirmation John King, Obama's new Secretary of Education.
Meanwhile, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, professed opponents of Common Core, stayed with conventional campaigning, missed the vote. So did Senators Jeff Sessions, John McCain and a few other cowardly GOPers.
Sad.
I'm not surprised Rubio skipped the vote. That's just Marco. But Cruz was a let down.
I wonder if the Cruz campaign even bothered to consider sending Ted to vote.
Hard to imagine the Ted Cruz of 2013 missing such a thing.
Think about it. Not one Ted Cruz supporter would have held it against him if he'd bagged the rally in their town to rush to DC to fight Common Core.
Think of Cruz bringing the firepower of his campaign, and the media attention it now commands, to the senate floor to shame Republicans on the verge of caving. It would have dominated yesterday's news cycle, crushing even mentions of Trump.
Ted Cruz could have been in a position to change history. He chose not to be there.
Even if he failed, he would showcased the GOP's continued betrayal of its voters, the kind of message that propels the Trump campaign. Cruz would have been seen as a fighter who needs, and deserves, rank and file voter support.
But no. Cruz stuck to a campaign schedule.
This is the second major misstep for Cruz in four days. His attempt to smear Trump when Trump's campaign was attacked by Chicago Brown Shirts was the other.
Today's Ted Cruz appears not to be the Ted Cruz of 2013 who took on the entire GOP establishment.
Perhaps today's Ted Cruz thought it best to steer clear of Washington yesterday.
Voting against a Common Core advocate might upset those establishment donors who have befriended the Cruz campaign since Jeb imploded.
When he announced his candidacy, Cruz cleverly positioned himself as the thinking farthest right Republican candidate. This handed the others the difficult task of trying to sorting out who precisely was better placed somewhere to the left of Cruz. A very tough definitional challenge for any Republican candidate.
ReplyDeleteBut then along came Trump who elevated a new prime category of how establishment a candidate was or not. Cruz was easily anti-establishment enough before Trump came along but he was now Trumped in this category.
As it turned out, the masses were more in favor of the most anti-establishment candidate than they were the most conservative or the most wonkisly establishment candidate. At first, Cruz cleverly did not go after Trump and let things develop. If he had continued that strategy, he would now be the “reasonable and rational alternative” to Trump. He was at first the obvious choice for any who eventually found Trump too much and all others but Cruz too little.
Due to the failures of everyone but Cruz and Trump, the establishment, in panic, would have been driven to Cruz despite their initial hatred of him.
By going all in with the establishment and becoming a weaker conservative, Cruz has now made himself unsatisfactory to both anti-establishment and strong conservative types. As it has turned out, the nomination was Cruz’s to lose and he made the tactical and strategic moral errors that lost it for him.