No strategies, friends, or money? No problem.
The
news that freshman Sen. Ted Cruz is running for president presents the obvious question:
Why?
Mr. Cruz, Republican of Texas, will make his announcement at Liberty University in Virginia, where he is expected to be a speaker at a convocation ceremony. His intention to declare his candidacy was first reported by The Houston Chronicle and an aide to Mr. Cruz, who requested anonymity, confirmed the report on Sunday.
Ted Cruz is well-known for being the senator who worked hardest to bring us a government shutdown. He's known for inflammatory statements, and being roundly disliked, and having a let's-say-"outspoken" father, and being a general thorn in the side of his own party. His accomplishments as a two-year senator are (1) the shutdown and (2) not much else. He will likely be running on a gamut of tea party issues, taking cues from a movement that like him is now both widely disliked and frequently dysfunctional.
Mr. Cruz will skip the habitual step of creating an exploratory committee as a precursor to a campaign, the newspaper reported, citing senior advisers to Mr. Cruz. The move seems designed to send a signal that he has completed the exploratory phase and is ready to run.
That's being generous. It seems more likely he skipped the step of exploring the plausibility of his candidacy because Ted Cruz, a creature of pure ego, is notoriously unconcerned with the details of the things he does and advocates for. As with his plan for shutting down the government then
something, he is not a man who plots the strategies of these things out. Think Steve Stockman, not Ronald Reagan.
Did I mention that nobody likes Ted Cruz? In the halls of power and money, he has no base of support.
[M]any Republican elites despise him for his loose-cannon approach. The Washington Post's George Will has said that Cruz "is frankly loathed by the GOP caucus," and that he "is completely indifferent to the fact that politics is a team sport. ABC's Jonathan Karl said during the shutdown battle that Cruz is "so hated" by Senate Republicans that he'd "need a food taster" at their weekly lunch.
His supposed public appeal is also quite narrow, with appeals to non-far-right audiences
failing spectacularly, although hilariously.
None of this is to say that Ted Cruz won't make his mark on the primaries, presuming his funding hasn't already dried up at that point. He will likely play a key role in goading Jeb Bush into saying horrible things, or making Jeb Bush look reasonable by comparison, or acting as the guy who stands between Jeb Bush and Donald Trump so Jeb Bush doesn't have to look at Trump so often. A noble cause, I suppose.