Cruz gets O’Rourke where he wants him — on a debate stage

[Elderberry]

By Jonathan Tilove - American-Statesman Staff 9/22/2018

For the first time in his re-election campaign, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had Democratic challenger U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, right where he wanted him Friday night — on a debate stage confined behind a lectern and constricted by 90-second answers, 60-second responses and 30-second rebuttals.

It forced O’Rourke to confront Cruz and his fusillade of accusations head-on, leaving him looking a little bit more like a conventional politician and not as the above-the-fray, post-partisan candidate O’Rourke has sought to present himself as.

It was a foreseeable trap, and a third of the way through the hourlong debate at Southern Methodist University, it sprang shut. As John Drogin, an old Cruz hand, put it in a tweet: “Beto before debate: I will not attack @tedcruz. Beto during debate: Attack attack attack.”

But O’Rourke’s harshest attacks were in response to what he described as Cruz putting words in his mouth and his “trick in the trade, to confuse and incite based on fear.”

When Cruz suggested that O’Rourke’s rhetoric after a recent Dallas shooting, in which a white police officer killed a black man in the man’s own home, might incite violence against police, an irritated O’Rourke snapped back, “This is why people don’t like Washington, D.C. — you just said something that I did not say and attributed it to me.”

“What did you not say?” replied Cruz, the cagey debater.

“I am not going to repeat the slander and mischaracterization,” replied O’Rourke, the wary prey.

On the road in his improbable run, O’Rourke has treated Cruz as his campaign’s Voldemort: a menacing specter that everyone in his audience is aware of, but whose name is better left unsaid. It has allowed O’Rourke to stay on the high road.

But a debate does not allow a candidate to ignore his opponent, especially one as practiced in the art of slash-and-burn politics as Cruz.

There will be two more debates — the next one at the University of Houston next Sunday, a town hall-style encounter with the candidates on stools, and the third and final one back behind lecterns Oct. 16 in San Antonio. At those events — but really for the rest of what has become the country’s most-watched U.S. Senate race — O’Rourke will have to engage with Cruz and figure out a way to do so while not scuffing his anti-politics brand, or die a death by a thousand cuts.

More: https://www.mystatesman.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/cruz-gets-rourke-where-wants-him-debate-stage/qEbtGaK8GcPTKFQfrY3AjO/

[austingirl]

Hilarious that Beatoff thinks he can portray himself as post-partisan. His platform is so far left it fell off the California coast. He came off very poorly in the debate.