Posted on

Cruz Says These Six Things Convinced Him to Support Trump

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) (photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

After Ted Cruz’s high-profile snub of Donald Trump during last July’s convention, it seemed likely that the Senator from Texas would emerge as the GOP’s chief conservative opponent of Trump as the election kicked into high gear this fall. However, with a lengthy Facebook post yesterday, Cruz surprised the political world, announcing that he would support his erstwhile rival just days before the first presidential debate.

Cruz gave two primary reasons for his apparent change of heart:

I’ve made this decision for two reasons. First, last year, I promised to support the Republican nominee. And I intend to keep my word.

Second, even though I have had areas of significant disagreement with our nominee, by any measure Hillary Clinton is wholly unacceptable — that’s why I have always been #NeverHillary.

He went on to describe six key policy areas where he feels Trump represents a significant improvement over Clinton — enough so as to outweigh any qualms he might still have about Trump:

First, and most important, the Supreme Court. For anyone concerned about the Bill of Rights — free speech, religious liberty, the Second Amendment — the Court hangs in the balance. I have spent my professional career fighting before the Court to defend the Constitution. We are only one justice away from losing our most basic rights, and the next president will appoint as many as four new justices. We know, without a doubt, that every Clinton appointee would be a left-wing ideologue.

Continue Reading
Posted on

Party’s Over: It’s Time for Conservatives to Leave the GOP

Since the conclusion of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the GOP has been tearing itself apart. And Senator Ted Cruz is already positioning himself to pick up the pieces and put the party back together.

National Review is reporting that Cruz donors are less-than-happy with his actions, however. Some are even threatening to support other candidates in future races.

On the night before Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination, Cruz gave a rousing speech in which he encouraged Americans to vote their consciences. The delegates in the Quicken Loans Arena, however, responded to this statement of principle with loud booing and threats of physical violence.

Photo credit: Disney | ABC Television Group via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

The speech was not the first time Cruz and his allies attempted to change the course of the convention, either. Prior to Cruz’s seismic remarks, conservative stalwarts Ken Cuccinelli and Senator Mike Lee tried to weaken the Republican National Committee’s power over the primary process. Serving as delegates on the rules committee, the Tea Partiers tried forcing votes on important rule changes to help secure grassroots victories in the future.

“This was an opportunity for the grassroots to finally spread power out in the party unlike 2012 and instead, we had a redo of 2012. We had a chairman gaveling through people who legitimately obeyed the rules to get a roll call vote. This was disenfranchisement, dare I say,” Cuccinelli said.

Clearly, Cruz and his allies have driven themselves into a tight corner in their attempt to preemptively position their 2020 campaign for the Republican nomination. Continue Reading

Posted on

Recap: Day Three at the GOP Convention (VIDEO)

There’s so much to talk about. So much. Where do I start?

Ted Cruz

Last night, Ted Cruz gave the most memorable political speech in recent memory. He took the stage to a standing ovation . . . and he left to an overwhelming chorus of boos.

What happened? Watch below:

The key moment comes at 19:00 in that video.

We deserve leaders who stand for principle. Who unite us all behind shared values. Who cast aside anger for love. That is the standard we should expect, from everybody.

And to those listening, please, don’t stay home in November. If you love our country, and love your children as much as I know that you do, stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.

At that point, the boos rained down as delegates and convention attendees realized the speech was a non-endorsement. Cruz attempted to make light of it:

I appreciate the enthusiasm of the New York delegation.

But it wasn’t just the New York delegation. The boos drowned out Cruz for the remainder of his speech. Reading the text of the speech, it doesn’t read nearly as badly as it felt at the time in Quicken Loans Arena. Many people were very angry and disappointed. And some, I’m sure, were thrilled that he refused to endorse Trump, but I didn’t see very many of them in my section. Continue Reading

Posted on

Report: Trump Benefited from Media Coverage, Clinton Suffered

Photo credit: flash.pro via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

A blitz of both positive and negative media coverage played a large role in propelling Donald Trump to capture the Republican nomination, according to a new Harvard study out of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. The study analyzed the coverage of both print and broadcast sources, reaching the conclusion that “Trump exploited their lust for riveting stories.” Had Trump spent money on advertising equivalent to the amount of free media coverage he got, he would have spent roughly $55 million, the study found. Trump’s next closest competitor, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, got just $36 million in free time by comparison.

Most of Trump’s media coverage (34 percent) had to do with his campaign activities and events, while 21 percent of it had to do with polls, and 27 percent of it was other miscellaneous coverage.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, independent Senator Bernie Sanders enjoyed the most positive coverage during the money primary, the report notes, while former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had the most unfavorable media coverage, with over a quarter of her reporting time spent on the issues and over 80 percent of that time spent on negative coverage. Trump, Ted Cruz, and Sanders had issues-related coverage 12, 9, and 7 percent of the time, respectively, and Trump had negative issues-related reporting 43 percent of the time, while both Cruz and Sanders had negative issues-related reporting less than one-third of the time.

With the primaries now over, will the media continue to bolster Trump and damage Clinton? Continue Reading

Posted on

Cruz Promises to Fight for Conservatives at GOP Convention

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) (photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

Last month, I wrote that the real battle to watch at the Republican National Convention in July would not be nomination-related but rather over the content of the Party’s platform, particularly in regards to social issues.

Conservatives have ample reason to be wary. Earlier this year, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump suggested he might support a watering down of the Republican plank on abortion, and mega-donor Paul Singer has been quietly funding an effort to change the GOP’s stance on marriage.

Given the possibility of these and other fights, it should come as no surprise that Sen. Ted Cruz, despite suspending his campaign over a month ago, is still working to influence the delegate-selection process in order to protect and promote conservative principles in Cleveland. Cruz made this clear during an interview last Friday with Oklahoma radio host Pat Campbell:

Before wrapping the interview, Campbell asked Cruz if he could promise to listeners to ensure Republicans in Cleveland do not “screw around with the party platform and remove the abortion plank, or alter it.”

“You have my word. One of the reasons that we are continuing to work to elect conservatives to be delegates, even though Donald has the delegates to get the nomination, we intend to do everything we can to fight for conservative principles to prevent Washington forces from watering down the platform,” Cruz said. “The platform is a manifestation of what we believe as a party, and I think it is important that it continue to reflect conservative values, free-market values, constitutional liberties, Judeo-Christian principles, the values that built this country, and that is exactly what I intend to fight for.”

How exactly will that fight play out this summer? Continue Reading

Posted on

Bloomberg News, Calling Gold “Everyone’s Favorite Standard,” Gives A Pulitzer-Worthy Scoop

Campaign poster for Republican presidential candidate William McKinley, 1900.

A report by Michelle Jamrisko in Bloomberg News on May 17th, headlined “Make America Gold Again: Calls for Everyone’s Favorite Standard Are Back,” suggests that the headline may have outrun its pass coverage. The gold standard is by no means “everyone’s” favorite standard. It has many critics.

And yet, giving due deference to an element of dramatic license, this report makes several very significant points, scooping the rest of the mainstream media.

The first key points are that, in the reported words of Jesse Hurwitz, a U.S. economist at Barclays Capital in New York — who considers the gold standard a bad idea — “The fringe has become the mainstream.” He considers the gold standard “something we’ll increasingly talk about.” This is an astute observation, far more so than Hurwitz’s facile dismissal of the gold standard itself.

Jamrisko points out that both Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and Ted Cruz, the runner up, have unflinchingly praised the gold standard:

Ted Cruz, in one of the early candidate debates last year, said the Fed “should get out of the business of trying to juice our economy and simply be focused on sound money and monetary stability, ideally tied to gold.”

[…]

Then there was Donald Trump. “We used to have a very, very solid country because it was based on a gold standard,” he told WMUR television in New Hampshire in March last year. But he said it would be tough to bring it back because “we don’t have the gold.

Continue Reading
Posted on

Clinton Supporters Are Recycling These 3 Failed Attacks on Trump

Donald Trump (photo credit: Disney | ABC Television Group via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)

Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee, an onslaught of negative ads are, undoubtedly, on the horizon. Trump is, by now, no stranger to negative campaigning, having already faced numerous attacks from his former Republican primary rivals, as well as high profile GOP leaders like Mitt Romney.

Now it’s Democrats’ turn. Politico reports that a pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC, Priorities USA Action, will start running anti-Trump messages this week:

The three central tenets of the message will be that the real estate investor is a divisive character, that he’s too dangerous to vote for, and that he’s a con man, Priorities’ chief strategist Guy Cecil explained to POLITICO on Monday — two days before the organization started its run of television advertising that’s set to effectively stay on the air straight through Election Day in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Virginia.

Given the failure of the GOP establishment to stop Trump, one would expect the Left to pursue a different set of tactics when attacking him. However, if Cecil’s statement represents their current plan, they are bound to be disappointed. These three “central tenets” are not new to voters. In fact, Trump’s GOP primary rivals tried all three to no avail.

Take, for example, the accusation that Trump has a “divisive character.” In August of last year, Jeb Bush compared Trump’s rhetoric to President Obama’s, stating that Trump used “[l]anguage that divides us,” and that “[a]ll [Trump] does is push people who don’t agree with him down to make his side look better and the divide makes it hard to solve problems.” Bush further cautioned the GOP against buying into rhetoric that is “really, really divisive that preys on peoples’ legitimate angst.” But despite Bush’s attacks, Trump’s poll numbers continued to rise, and after finishing well behind Trump in several primaries, Bush dropped out on February 21st. Continue Reading

Posted on

Campaign Leak: Did a Cruz-Rubio Ticket Nearly Happen?

From left: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)

It’s a time-honored tradition. Candidate runs for president. Candidate loses. Candidate’s campaign staff blames everyone and everything in an anonymous tell-all piece to the media. It happens every cycle — should’a, would’a, could’a.

But this piece at CNN is still worth a read. Apparently there was a real push to put Marco Rubio on Ted Cruz’s ticket prior to the March 15th primary in Florida. Jake Tapper reports at CNN:

Top officials of the Cruz campaign are convinced there is one specific step that could have stopped Trump — and they blame Sen. Marco Rubio for not taking that step.

In early March, it became clear that Trump was well on his way to the nomination and would even likely defeat Rubio in his home state of Florida’s March 15 primary. According to several sources close to Cruz, the Cruz campaign conducted several secret polls to see what the impact would be if Rubio joined Cruz as his running mate, with Cruz at the top of the ticket.

The Cruz campaign polled in three March 15 primary states, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina — though not in Ohio, home to Kasich, or in Florida.

They also tested the matchup in a poll in Arizona, which would hold its contest on March 22, and in Wisconsin, which would hold its primary on April 5.

What did polls suggest a Cruz-Rubio ticket would do in those states?

“Blowout,” said a source close to Cruz.

Continue Reading
Posted on

Daria Novak Campaigns for the Gold Standard in Congressional Race

Photo credit: Bullion Vault via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Daria Novak is crusading for the gold standard in her race for Congress in eastern Connecticut. Now, Novak recently has received the endorsement of George Gilder, the living author most quoted by President Reagan and the author of many influential books such as the million seller Wealth and Poverty — the “bible” of Reaganomics — and the new Amazon best-seller The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers But The Economy Never Does. In a public statement Gilder declares:

Daria Novak’s endorsement of gold shows she understands one of the core problems facing the American economy: the Federal Reserve’s monopoly money is corrupting Wall Street, gelding Silicon Valley, and killing Main Street. I urge her election.

Novak, on her website (as, reportedly, in her stump speech) states:

Prosperity: Restore the American Dream

The classical gold standard is Constitutional money and it made America great. The late, great Jack Kemp introduced perfect legislation for restoring the gold standard, co-sponsored by Newt Gingrich, with the Gold Standard Act of 1984. If elected my first official act will be reintroducing that legislation substantively word for word, and then crusading on that as key to getting job creation, economic security, and upward mobility back at a sizzling rate.

Novak is in distinguished company. The gold standard is re-emerging as an attractive formula for restoring the American Dream of equitable prosperity. Both the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump, and his closest rival, Sen. Ted Cruz, publicly praised the gold standard in the context of the presidential primary:

Donald Trump:

In a GQ video interview, the billionaire said he would support … the gold standard.

Continue Reading
Posted on

Kudos to Ted Cruz

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) (photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

After Indiana’s disappointing results came in, Texas Senator Ted Cruz suspended his campaign. It was a very wise decision.

I had just finished an appearance on the Fox Business Network, in which I tried to avoid suggesting that he should drop out. But by the time I got back to my house, Senator Cruz had made the announcement.

Tuesday night, Senator Cruz put the country before his own ambitions. He knows the ultimate goal is to stop Hillary Clinton and prevent the left’s “fundamental transformation” of America. The Republican Party and the conservative movement must be united.

And the party is coming together. As I write, news is breaking that Ohio Governor John Kasich has suspended his campaign too.

As a former presidential candidate, I know that it is never an easy decision to drop out. You know you are letting loyal supporters down. But as Senator Cruz said Tuesday night, the movement to defend the Constitution and our Judeo-Christian values continues.

He reminded us Tuesday night that there is no substitute for victory. We must defeat Hillary Clinton in November!

Surprised by Cruz’s decision, Donald Trump praised Cruz as “one hell of a competitor,” adding, “He is a tough, smart guy. And he has got an amazing future.”

In fact, some have suggested Senator Cruz would make a great Supreme Court Justice. As a clerk to the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Cruz learned from one of the best.

Gary L. Bauer served in President Ronald Reagan’s administration for eight years, as Under Secretary of Education and as President Reagan’s Chief Domestic Policy Advisor. Continue Reading