Ted Cruz Declares War On Math & Reality

by JASmius

Senator Cruz appears to be the only person in Obamerika who didn't get the memo on the results of the 2012 election:

Slightly more than an hour after speaking nearly a full day on the Senate floor, Texas Senator Ted Cruz continued his battle against Obamacare on Rush Limbaugh's radio program on Wednesday, charging his fellow Republicans with a "defeatist attitude" that manifested itself through empty "show votes" that deceive constituents.

"Part of what's so problematic with Washington is how many Republicans want a show vote to pretend to their constituents they're fighting for what they say they're fighting for, rather than actually fighting for it and actually winning," the freshman Republican senator told Limbaugh.

"In both parties, you've got entrenched politicians who have barely veiled contempt for the American people," Cruz said. "They think their voters are gullible rubes — and you give them a little 'show vote,' you tell them, 'Hey, I'm totally with you,' then they go to Washington and they don't actually do what they say."

It's not "defeatism" when you actually did lose last November, Senator.  If we had a Republican majority in the Senate and Mitt Romney in the White House and there was GOP foot-dragging about getting rid of ObamaCare, I would not only concede your point but would have beaten you to the punch by a wide margin.  But that's not the case.  The other side still has the presidency, still has the Senate (by a wider margin) and holds the House (by a narrower margin).  That plainly and simply limits what your party can do, and that much less so about an ambition, an infernal dream, that the American Left pursued for over seven decades and will not give up anywhere near as easily as you seem to think they will.  That's not defeatism, Senator; it's a rational recognition of reality.  It majorly sucks, but the fact that we don't like it doesn't change it.

Otto Van Bismarck once said, "Politics is the art of the possible".  Defunding ObamaCare is not possible, because most of the funding is statutory, not discretionary..  And eliminating the discretionary part is functionally impossible as well, because your party simply doesn't have the numbers, and therefore the clout, to do it.  The vexing thing is that you seem to believe that that can be changed if Republicans just try hard enough, as though it were nothing more than a function of effort and virtue.  To quote one of Murphy's Laws, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong - but that's the way to bet."  Or, as Narnian High King Peter Pevensie replied when his Centaur lieutenant said of Jadis The White Witch's much larger army, "Number do not win a battle," "No; but I bet they help."  This is not a battle that Republicans don't want to have; it's a battle that seemingly every Republican but you can plainly see isn't winnable.

Which is why I question your motivations, sir.  Whatever else you may be, Senator, you are not a stupid man.  Quite the opposite; from your Princeton education to your clerking for federal appellate court judges and Chief Justice William Rehnquist to serving as Texas's solicitor general, you have amply demonstrated your mental wattage.  So I simply cannot believe that you don't see what a fool's errand your crusade is.  But my cranial capabilities aren't inconsiderable either, and it isn't difficult to see how you've laid out your pieces on the old Klin zha board.  Your ambitions for higher office aren't exactly a secret.  By launching this one-man blitzkrieg, you raise your national profile and get a leg up on consolidating the entire Tea Party wing behind you, and rev them up all the more by smearing your own party as "squishes" and "sellouts" and "part of the problem" - hence your obnoxious "Washington establishment" mantra when you should be railing at Red Barry and the Democrats, who did, after all, foist ObamaCare on the country over unanimous GOP opposition.  The hype and momentum build through 2016, when you sweep, Reagan-like, to the nomination, and the burgeoning tsunami sweeps you into the White House.  Where is OCare in all this?  Why, still in place and, by that time, entrenched forever.  But you figure we'll all forget that little detail.

Of course, there are some flaws in that scenario.  For one, the media that put Barack Obama in the White House years, decades before he would ever have been ready (if ever) will, to put it outrageously mildly, not do you that same favor.  But you also grievously misperceive President Reagan as well.  When his bid for the 1976 GOP presidential nomination against President Ford fell agonizingly short, the Tea Party of his day, enraged and embittered at the so-called "GOP establishment," urged, nigh begged, him to run a third party candidacy in the general campaign, for no other reason than to screw Ford.  He easily could have; but he didn't.  Instead of rivening the party and handing Jimmy Carter a huge landslide, Dutch instead loyally supported and campaigned for Ford that fall.  After the president's narrow defeat, the way to the '80 Republican nomination was open.  Because it was Reagan's "turn," and because he hadn't burned his bridges behind him, he won the nomination and defeated Jimmy Carter, and the rest is history.

What President Reagan understood, and you quite evidently do not, Senator, is that (1) ideas do not sell themselves; they need a viable candidate to serve as their vehicle; and (2) candidates do not get elected without a viable national platform from which to run - i.e. political parties.  If the Gipper had taken the advice of the TPers of his day, it might have been cathartic, but it would also have doomed the cause in which he believed, and the country right along with it by guaranteeing Jimmy Carter a second term.  He knew he needed the Republican Party as the vehicle for his candidacy in order to actually have a chance of getting elected; just as he knew that only by winning the election could he get in the position to implement his ideas into public policy.

Senator Cruz, I remember Ronald Reagan; Ronald Reagan was a friend of mine; and you, sir, are no Ronald Reagan.  You demand the ends but sabotage the means; you want to become president, but you seek to do so by alienating large swaths of your own party instead of reaching out to them, appealing to their "better natures," bringing together and unifying them against the real enemy.  You're not willing to listen, but instead insist that it's your way or the highway, and anybody who differs with you to the slightest degree on anything is a "defeatist" worthy of only your dripping, abject contempt.

Senator, it is you who isn't listening to the American people, because while they are nominally against ObamaCare, most also know little or nothing about it; it's an abstraction to them, which is why that opposition is a mile wide and an inch deep - how else to explain their re-electing Red Barry a year ago?  Nor are more than a small fraction even paying attention to your conspicuously herculean efforts to force an unwinnable government shutdown showdown.  The only thing that will decisively turn them against OCare is its taking effect - a fact of which you are clearly aware since you are doing everything you can to get out in front of that wave so as to take credit it for it when it comes and use it as a cudgel to further bludgeon your own party.

Ever hear of the "Eleventh Commandment," Senator?  It says, "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican".  Know who originated it?  Ronald Reagan.  And he did so in a time when there really wasn't a dime's worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats, and the former were saying mighty unkind things about him.  Because of the Reagan Revolution, and later the Gingrich Revolution in Congress, the GOP today is far more conservative than it was when the Gipper came to Washington.  You would take a big step towards restoring your honor by acknowledging that, and remembering that we really are all in this together.

Exit question: Is Krauthammer now a "defeatist" too?