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A lot of people are fixated on Donald Trump going into the first Republican Presidential debate. I\u2019m actually more interested in another candidate \u2013 Ted Cruz \u2013 because I think he\u2019s going to make a more intriguing debater.<\/p>\n
Flannery O\u2019Connor, a conservative Catholic, explained in \u201cThe Fiction Writer and His Country\u201d why she wrote such grotesque stories: \u201cWhen you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock \u2013 to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.\u201d O\u2019Connor, unwittingly, was speaking of Ted Cruz\u2019s rhetorical style: Cruz, believing his fellow citizens to be almost-deaf and almost-blind, revels today in startling pronouncements. Having grown up in Ted Cruz\u2019s world \u2013 Baptist roots, homeschooled by Texas evangelicals \u2013 I find it easy to get inside the man\u2019s mind. Going into the first debate, here are what I take to be some key facts and fictions about him.<\/p>\n
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1. Ted Cruz is self-centered, ambitious, and convinced he can win. I think this one\u2019s a fact \u2013 Cruz is driven (maybe even arrogant), he thinks he\u2019s right, and he has a burning desire to be at the center of the political conversation. But I am not convinced that the win that Cruz thinks he can get is the office of the Presidency. In an era in which the habit of our political officeholders is to rush to their pollsters before every decision, Cruz knows that winning means shaping the conversation \u2013 and not necessarily holding the office itself. This is why I think that the guy will make such an interesting debater: the election is a victory for team Cruz if they get us to pay attention to their worldview. And Cruz, as a Latino and a conservative from Texas, knows that a failed Presidential bid is not the end of the line.<\/p>\n
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2. Cruz\u2019s interest in dismantling the IRS is merely a campaign promise. I think this one is a half-fiction. Cruz convinced his wife to gamble their entire fortune of just over $1 Million on his Senate race, at a time when he was trailing badly in the polls. As an American President, he might go for broke. True, his advisors would say \u201cdo you want to be a one-term President or a two-term President?\u201d Cruz would then compromise. But a compromise for Cruz would mean something different than it does for others: merely settling for a gutted and rehabbed IRS, maybe. Fortunately for IRS backers, Washington is now so dysfunctional that American Presidents can no longer bring about large-scale governance changes.<\/p>\n
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3. Cruz would be formidable in presidential debates. As mentioned, I think this one\u2019s a fact. Alan Dershowitz, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, described Cruz as \u201coff-the-chart brilliant.\u201d The man has prepared his entire life for this and would be out for blood. When Scott Walker was at IBM and doing marketing for the Red Cross, Cruz was researching Con Law with Robert George at Princeton and envisioning himself as the second coming of James Madison. The upside for Walker and the other Republican hopefuls is that fewer Americans are now watching the presidential debates.<\/p>\n
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4. A Ted Cruz presidency would destabilize the Middle East. I think this one\u2019s probably a fiction. Lyndon Johnson famously defeated Barry Goldwater by suggesting through his \u2018Daisy\u2019 TV ad that a Goldwater election could lead to nuclear war. But Cruz has a lot more affinity with Middle Eastern Muslims than Goldwater had with the Soviets. As a Texas evangelical, Cruz often feels his worldview to be closer to that of conservative Muslims than to that of American liberals. The Muslims, he thinks, are struggling alongside him against leftist sexual politics. His respect for their worldview would almost certainly equip him in foreign relations \u2013 with Iran, with the Kurds, with the House of Saud. True, many Texas Christians are loud Israel supporters. But at the end of the day when it comes to cultural morals a lot of them are closer to conservative Muslims than they are to the liberals in their own denominations. In Cruz\u2019s mind, America is a cancerous patient and the tumor must be removed. More dangers are within the body politic than outside it.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not necessarily a Cruz supporter (he comes across, at least, as arrogant), and I\u2019m also not convinced that Cruz\u00a0 can win the Republican nomination (I think he\u2019s too far to the right for the party\u2019s business class). But I do think he\u2019ll make the debate ride interesting.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 A lot of people are fixated on Donald Trump going into the first Republican Presidential debate. I\u2019m actually more interested in another candidate \u2013 Ted Cruz \u2013 because I think he\u2019s going to make a more intriguing debater. Flannery O\u2019Connor, a conservative Catholic, explained in \u201cThe Fiction Writer and His Country\u201d why she wrote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n