Cruz showed his love of country, Kasich showed his love of himself

“With a heavy heart but with boundless optimism for the long-term future of our nation, we are suspending our campaign,” Senator Ted Cruz said. And with that sentence, the American people had their final say on the Republican nomination.

It wasn’t as dramatic a scene as some had hoped.

Many had predicted the 2016 GOP convention would be more contentious than any we’d ever known. The #NeverTrump folks envisioned scenarios where other candidates made a legal, strategic move there, wresting the win that Donald Trump rightfully earned with maneuvering that would make the Democrats blush.

But Cruz is not that guy, and he just proved it with this one gesture.

By stepping aside in favor of party unity and the future of the nation, he showed other candidates what patriotism actually looks like. John Kasich, of course, was like glitter from your child’s kindergarten project that gets on your clothes and is still there weeks after the project is in the trash. After placing distant third in Indiana’s primary, John Weaver (Kasich’s campaign’s chief strategist) made sure everyone knew that the Ohio governor isn’t going anywhere. “Gov. Kasich will remain in the race unless a candidate reaches 1,237 bound delegates before the Convention,” he wrote in a memo, probably because he couldn’t have said this with a straight face.

Mere hours later, however, reality must’ve set in with the Kasich campaign. After canceling his morning press conference, news drifted out that he too was dropping out of the race causing National Review to absolutely demolish him:

John Kasich is calling it quits. Good riddance. It is however, worth remembering exactly how pitiful, delusional, and destructive his campaign had become.  He didn’t start out pathetic. As a popular center-right governor of a key swing state, he had a case to make, but he proceeded to make it in the most cloying, disingenuous, and self-righteous manner possible. Famously egotistical and thin-skinned, he recast himself as some sort of Republican Christ figure (he actually called himself the “prince of light and hope“), hugging his way across the land. He took advantage of his own irrelevance (no one bothered to waste any time attacking him) to cast himself as above the fray — the only adult in the room. When it became clear that he had no chance in New Hampshire, he defined victory down — all the way down to an almost 20-point loss to Donald Trump. On primary night he had the incredible audacity to declare, “Tonight, the light overcame the darkness.” Kasich was just warming up. He barnstormed to fourth and fifth-place victories, accumulating virtually no delegates but siphoning off valuable votes from contenders who had an actual chance. He ultimately won a single state — Ohio — and even in his home state he couldn’t muster a majority of the vote.

The piece goes on to say:

If Trump’s one-word message was “winning,” then Kasich’s one-word message was “me.”

However, Cruz always knew that there was more at stake than his own ego.

“From the beginning I’ve said that I would continue on as long as there was a viable path to victory,” he said. “Tonight I’m sorry to say it appears that path has been foreclosed.”

Cruz had the integrity to step aside, no matter how personally painful it must’ve been for him – with his wife by his side.

“The challenges we face today remain as great as ever,” Cruz told his devastated supporters. “Americans are deeply frustrated and desperately want to change the path that we’re on.”

We are blessed to have such a selfless man as Cruz remaining in the United States Senate.  He ran an honest campaign that put the interests of the nation above his own personal brand and ambition.  I can’t wait to see what he does next.