McCain: Cruz "Crossed Line," Should Apologize To Dole

by JASmius

Behold, my friends, another chapter in the GOP civil war:

A day after Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz suggested former GOP presidential candidates Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney “don’t stand for principle,” McCain shot back Friday, saying the fiery conservative had “crossed a line” and should apologize to war hero Dole.

“He can say what he wants to about me and he can say anything he wants to about Mitt,” the senator from Arizona said on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.”

“But when he throws Bob Dole in there, I wonder if he thinks that Bob Dole stood for principle on that hilltop in Italy, when he was so gravely wounded and left part of his body there fighting for our country?”

My God, I get tired of serving as referee for these pointless intra-party scrums.

So, alright, let's indulge Darth Queeg and take a look at what Senator Cruz actually said:

Cruz, in a speech Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, told the crowd the three losing presidential candidates should have stood up for their views.

“All of us remember President Dole, President McCain, and President Romney, “ Cruz said facetiously.

“All of those are good men, those are decent men — but when you don’t stand and draw a clear distinction, when you don’t stand for principle, Democrats celebrate,” he said.

<Fingers drumming>  Well, nothing that Cruz said here was inaccurate, generally speaking, although he did oversimplify things a bit.

Going "counter-clockwise," as it were, it would be more fair to say that Mitt Romney didn't have any views to stand up for, although I think that he did sincerely adopt a conservative worldview in the run up to the 2012 campaign, and fell short due to his inability to "speak the language" as well as Obamunist voter fraud and the timing of SuperStorm Sandy.

Sailor, by contrast, did indeed have views and did indeed stand up for them.  They were simply the wrong views, with the sometime-exception of national defense issues, and he took great delight in shivving his own party on and with them for years.  If there's an ideological mirror counterpart to Ted Cruz for intra-Republican divisiveness and venom, it's John McCain.

But Bob Dole?  He was the product of his generation.  He was an Eisenhower Republican from the pre-Goldwater era, when the GOP really was "only a few notches to the right of the statist liberal left Democrats".  I don't think you can hold that against him in the same way that you can McCain, who has gone out of his way to be maximally obnoxious about it to cultivate that "Maverick" image.  What we today call "RINOism" was simply written into Dole's political DNA.

McCain fired back at Cruz because, well, they are ideological mirror opposites for intra-Republican divisiveness and venom.  Cruz's wisecrack lit the call of battle in his beady little eyes.

Besides, it's not as though the 90-year-old Dole couldn't defend himself:

“Cruz should check my voting record before making comments,” he said in a statement. “I was one of President Reagan’s strongest supporters, and my record is that of a traditional Republican conservative.”

Perhaps in Dole's later Senate years.  But that was at least as much a function of his role as Senate GOP leader as it was any newfound ideological conviction.  And none of that had anything to do with his blowout defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton in 1996; that sorry result was the product of (1) Sick Willie being unbeatable that year and (2) Dole being too old and a charisma sinkhole in a mass/instant media age that makes every presidential race a beauty contest far more than a substantive issues debate.  In short, no Republican could have knocked off Mr. Bill in '96, and I don't think there was a Democrat Dole could have beaten.  Not unlike Maverick's doomed run in 2008, come to think of it.  No wonder the Arizonan was so prickly-by-proxy about Cruz's insult.

Suffice it to say, McCain's demand for an apology from Cruz has....questionable motives.

My only criticism of the Texas junior senator is not what he said, but how he said it.  Why did he deem it necessary to take ball shots at Dole and Romney (McCain deserved his) to make his point about needing unabashedly conservative presidential standard-bearers?  Surely the point could have been made just fine and more effectively without them.

This, you see, is why I am not a fan of Ted Cruz.  For a man as ostensibly principled as he is, he conspicuously lacks the wisdom to diplomatically leaven his rhetoric so as to make his entreaties appealing and alluring to "establishmentarians" rather than alienating and insulting.  That's what Ronald Reagan did in a time when the GOP was not nearly as broadly conservative as it is now, and he managed to unify the party under that conservative banner for a full decade, and sew the seeds for the later Gingrich "revolution" in Congress.  TC, by stark contrast, can't seem to go a week without provoking some needless intramural pissing contest.

In short, if Ted Cruz truly wants to "conservativize" the Republican Party, he needs to stop being such a dick about it.

Whether or not he apologizes to the Tax Collector for the welfare state, I couldn't remotely care less.