Hooray, and so forth.
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz has an innovative campaign strategy:
get endorsed by losers?
Tennessee's Joe Carr, Mississippi's Chris McDaniel, and South Carolina's Lee Bright, three conservatives who opposed longtime GOP senators in 2014 primaries, have all backed Cruz for president. It's a small part of Cruz's effort to do next year what those candidates did last year: serve as a vessel for conservative voters' frustration with the political establishment.
All three of those fellows were hard-right tea party candidates who tried to take down too-liberal Republican senators like, um, fellow Republican presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, but failed. That they've all thrown their support behind Ted Cruz is not too surprising. He embodies what they longed to be: a loudmouthed, hated-by-everybody senator who's constantly threatening to shut the government down unless he gets a pony
right the hell now.
"I think he embodies the mood of the folks around the country," said Bright, Cruz's South Carolina campaign co-chair. Bright added that Cruz is "the anti-establishment candidate, and that's what many of us were, and I think that's why we've gravitated towards him."
You will note that Sen. Ted Cruz has been able to pry loose exactly no support from his fellow senators for his presidential run. He has made it a point in the Senate to pick fights with leadership, and to publicly scorn and mock his fellow senators, and the Cruz-engineered government shutdown cost the party dearly and gained them absolutely nothing. Likewise, he's been flummoxed on the campaign trail by Donald Trump, who has ratcheted Cruz's anti-immigrant, anti-everything talking points up to eleven and deftly stolen Cruz's main base of support. Getting the support of fellow tea party candidates who tried to run for something but failed is not exactly any campaign's dream endorsement list, but it may be the best he'll be getting.