Ted Cruz is having a really bad week. His crusade to defund the Affordable Care Act is toast and so is his career – at least if the Republican Party has its way.
Chris Wallace revealed that high level Republicans sent opposition research on Cruz before his interview on Sunday.
Monday, Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham did all they could to distance themselves from Cruz, Mike Lee and their plan to push the U.S. economy over the debt ceiling cliff in the name of defunding affordable health care for 30 million Americans.
Even Rand Paul, the second craziest Teabagger in the Senate, is abandoning the crusade and distancing himself from the guy who wishes there were 100 more segregationists like Jesse Helms in the Senate.
All these guys hate the idea of Americans having access to healthcare as much as Cruz does, but even they can see that Cruz’s plan is nutsy cuckoo. Early in the crusade, Cruz argued that Obamacare is a train wreck, but the only train wreck in sight is Cruz’s strategy to defund Obamacare by filibustering a House bill he said he supports.
To make matters worse, Cruz’s most powerful weapon is …. Sarah Palin.
Cruz is often praised as a “smart” Republican who went to Harvard and taught constitutional law before he blew into the Senate with visions of Joe McCarthy dancing in his head.
Republicans are freaking out because the Cruz envisioned filibuster to defund Obamacare, means a government shutdown for which Republicans will rightly pay the price. And while Cruz epitomizes the self-centeredness that Republicans usually admire, it’s a whole different thing when they are the ones who will pay the consequences.
Strike two is the fact that Cruz sees his alienation from the Republican Party and all but 19% of the American people as a good thing.
Strike three is Sarah Palin, the half term governor of Alaska who only got her job back at Fox after agreeing to a 75% pay cut. Palin is just as self-centered and ideological as Cruz. But her support is just the latest and strongest hint that Cruz’s strategy is bound to fail.
Jason Zengerle’s article in GQ summarizes characteristics that Cruz and his Republican compatriots share, with one major difference.
Cruz, 42, arrived in Washington in January as the ultimate conservative purist, a hero to both salt-of-the-earth Tea Partiers and clubby GOP think-tankers, and since then he has come to the reluctant but unavoidable conclusion that he is simply more intelligent, more principled, more right—in both senses of the word—than pretty much everyone else in our nation’s capital. That alone isn’t so outrageous for the Senate. “Every one of these guys thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room,” one senior Democratic aide told me. “But Cruz is utterly incapable of cloaking it in any kind of collegiality. He’s just so brazen….”
In other words, Cruz has lost friends and gained enemies because he’s even more arrogant, full of himself and tyrannical than the rest of them are.
Those are traits he shares with Sarah Palin, who is one of the few Republicans to publicly support Cruz with tweets to Fox (which were ignored), a Facebook post and even words of defiance while appearing on Fox.
She really went all out by writing a word salad for Breitbart on the weekend. Considering that Sarah is intellectually challenged when she has to write cheat notes on her hand, this is huge. In fact, Palin is so into defending Cruz that she threatened to resurrect her battered political career for a Senate run so that Ted will have some reinforcements.
Cruz lost friends in the Senate, and the Republican Party. He will lose the crusade to defund Obamcare, but he’ll always have Sarah Palin.
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