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Ted Cruz - The Tea Party Opportunity

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<a href="http://articlesoninformation.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">The Tea Party Candidate</a></div>

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<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<li>There is a reason every nation on earth (except the U.S.) has 
multiple political parties. All societies break down into many different
 factions.  I can't imagine the big government loving, pro wealth 
redistribution GOP nominating a Tea Party candidate for President.  Hell
 would freeze over first.</li>
<li>Best case scenario. 
 -  I am impressed with Governor Scott Walker who comes to the 
Presidential table with his spine fully intact.  Depending on the 
campaign I can see a possible Walker-Cruz or Walker-Rubio ticket.</li>
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(Reason.com)  -  Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) just announced that he’s
 running for president at a speech at Liberty University in Lynchburg, 
Virginia. He’s the first candidate to make the announcement official in 
the 2016 cycle. Here are five things to know about Cruz and his 
candidacy. 1. He wanted to be the first candidate to announce because he thought it would bring him attention.
 Being first out of the gate, his campaign hopes, will catch the eye of 
both high-engagement Republican primary voters and the media—and, in the
 process, might slow or stop Gov. Scott Walker’s rapid rise. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/us/politics/ted-cruz-2016-presidential-race.html?partner=socialflow&smid=tw-nytimes" target="_blank">Via</a>The New York Times:<blockquote>

By becoming the first candidate to declare himself officially in the 
race, Republicans briefed on his strategy said, Mr. Cruz hopes to 
reclaim the affection and attention of those on the party’s right wing 
who have begun eyeing other contenders, particularly Gov. Scott Walker 
of Wisconsin. </blockquote>
<blockquote>

“It’s the shiny object principle. He wants to be first, get in the 
conversation, not show any doubt or hesitation,” said Dave Carney, a 
longtime Republican strategist. “There’s an advantage to being first. 
He’s now the only one running for president, instead of engaging in this
 Kabuki dance that the others are.”</blockquote>

Of course there’s always a danger to being first, too, which is that by the time the big scrum gets going, you’re old news.  2. He’s targeting tea party conservatives first, social conservatives and libertarians second. A Houston Chronicle<a href="http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/us/article/Ted-Cruz-to-announce-presidential-bid-Monday-6150894.php?t=ec04aca79dc2a96c75&cmpid=twitter-premium" target="_blank">report</a>
 over the weekend sketched out the basic strategy: “Cruz will vie for 
the support of the tea party electorate, his advisers say, but will fare
 well enough with social conservative and libertarian voters to assemble
 a powerful coalition.” The content of the speech, which leaned heavily 
on Cruz’s personal faith, and the location of the announcement, at a 
prominent evangelical college founded by the late Jerry Falwell, make me
 wonder if perhaps he’s targeting social cons as much as tea party 
types—leaving libertarians a distant, lonely second. </div>

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 3. He’s practically adored by the GOP’s conservative base. As Ben Domenech writes in this morning’s <a href="http://bendomenech.com/transom/" target="_blank">Transom</a> newsletter:<blockquote>

Ted Cruz matches up with the activist base better than any other 
significant candidate in a long time. I don’t think people outside of 
that base really understand how powerful Cruz’s appeal is to the 
populist energized conservative voter, which is of course just a faction
 of the right, but is a sizable faction. Cruz’s critics need to hope 
that he is limited to this faction, and incapable of appealing outside 
of it. But that may not prove to be the case, particularly if Cruz is 
able to cut into the appeal of, say, Walker for pro-business types, 
Huckabee for social conservatives, Paul for libertarianish Republicans 
and the like. And he doesn’t just match up with them on policy, he 
matches up with their brashness, their yearning for someone who loves 
the taste of blood in his mouth.</blockquote>

I can vouch for this. I saw Cruz’s speech at the Conservative Political 
Action Conference a few weeks ago, and the crowd ate it up. He was 
speaking their language; it was a rock-concert-like mind-meld between 
speaker and audience. Cruz really connects with these folks, and, 
perhaps just as importantly, he doesn't embarass them like some other 
base-friendly candidates in years past. 
4. Cruz is running on a flat tax.
 He hasn’t offered a whole lot of details, but he’s said repeatedly that
 he wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service entirely. And in 
today’s speech, he touted the idea using a familiar pitch, saying his 
goal would be to “let every American fill out his or her taxes on a 
postcard." 5. Cruz is adamantly against ethanol cronyism—even in Iowa. Cruz has pushed a bill to repeal the Renewable Fuel Standard, and, as Politico’s Morning Energy <a href="http://www.politico.com/morningenergy/" target="_blank">notes</a>, he stood his ground against the RFS in a recent trip to Iowa.<blockquote>

Cruz has co-sponsored legislation that would repeal the Renewable Fuel 
Standard over a period of five years, and when he spoke at an 
agriculture summit in RFS-loving Iowa earlier this month, he stuck to 
his guns. "The answer you'd like me to give is 'I'm for the RFS, darn 
it,'" Cruz responded to Bruce Rastetter, the agribusiness mogul who 
organized the summit. "That'd be the easy thing to do. But people are 
pretty fed up with politicians that run around and tell one group one 
thing and tell another group another thing. Then they go to Washington 
and don't do anything they said they would do."</blockquote>

That’s a real contrast to Scott Walker, <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2015/03/09/scott-walker-flip-flops-in-favor-of-fede" target="_blank">who flip-flopped on the issue</a> at a recent Iowa stop. Indeed, Cruz’s clear stance against the federal ethanol mandate makes him somewhat <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/republican-candidates-tiptoe-around-ethanol-subsidies-in-iowa/article/2561208" target="_blank">rare</a> in the GOP field.</div>

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