http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/414603/cruz-recycles-all-his-lines-and-crowd-loves-it-eliana-johnsonby Eliana Johnson February 27, 2015 11:24 PM West Palm Beach
– Ted Cruz is a grassroots favorite with a reputation for electrifying conservative crowds with rallying cries against the Republican establishment. His pitch to the party’s top-dollar donors isn’t much different. On stage Friday evening before some of the Republican party’s biggest benefactors, Cruz called for gutting Obamacare and the IRS — standard elements of his stump speech that generated the most applause from a crowd of donors, too.
“We need to repeal every word of Obamacare,” he said, calling it, as he so often does, “the single biggest job-killer in this country.” He went on: “I think the simplest and best tax reform, we should abolish the IRS.”
His jokes were recycled, too. “We could’ve had tonight for a dinner speaker Hillary Clinton,” Cruz said as he took the stage, “but we couldn’t find a foreign nation to foot the bill.”
On stage Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, he said the same, referring to a Washington Post report that several foreign governments donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
It’s something of an oddity that Cruz, widely considered the 2016 candidate with the most serious intellectual bona fides, and somebody with a long history as a debater and public speaker who eschews podia and prepared texts, relies so heavily on canned lines. Even his acknowledgement of his wife, Heidi, seems to be done by memory. In all of his public appearances, and again tonight, he praises her beauty, brilliance, and business savvy. “She is my best friend in the entire world,” he says, and he said it again tonight.
There were some deviations: references to a vacation at the Breakers, the posh Palm Beach hotel where the conference is being held, and to dinners with other donors in places enclaves like Beverly Hills, Calif. The Texas senator recounted regaling a Beverly Hills couple with the inside story of last year’s debt-ceiling fight during which, he said, Senate Republican leaders pushed to lower the threshold to bring the matter to the floor to 51 votes from 60. Republican leaders, he said, advocated that course so that in a vote the president would get a clean debt ceiling despite Republican opposition. As he told the story to a skeptical business owner in Beverly Hills, Cruz described his response:
“The bastards . . .”
For the first time on Friday Cruz laid out publicly his strategy for victory in a general election, one that National Review chronicled in December: Eschew the popular notion that the Republican nominee must run to the center. Turn out the right’s disaffected voters, many of whom have stayed home in the past two elections, by running to the right.
“In my view, the central question if we’re going to win in ’16 is how do we bring back to the polls the millions of Americans who’ve stayed home,” Cruz told the crowd. “If they’re going to stay home, we lose.”
Cruz suggested that his principled and confrontational brand of conservatism could not only “turn out the base by the millions” but also win swing voters. It was a stark contrast to the case laid out by Jeb Bush on Thursday evening, who suggested that Republicans must moderate their message if they are to be competitive once again.
“This is counterintuitive,” he Cruz said. “But in the last 50 years, there’s one Republican who has a group of Democrats named after him.” Cruz said that Reagan’s willingness to “draw a line in the sand” and take a stand against government regulation and intervention won him the affection of FDR Democrats and hinted that he could claim the Reagan mantle and win the hearts of the 40th president’s Democratic supporters.
As Cruz made his pitch to donors on stage, he also worked to woo them behind the scenes. The Club’s conference provides an opportunity for politicians to spend plenty of time with donors, but a Club insider says Cruz took it to another level. “He is working this thing more than anybody else,” he says. Cruz planned his own private reception before the Club-sponsored reception that preceded his speech, and, says the insider, “he’s trying to maximize the take from this more than anybody else.”
Cruz, like most of the other potential candidates here this weekend, arrived in Palm Beach from CPAC, where 2016 contenders are attempting to win the favor of the party’s young, rank-and-file activists. On stage at CPAC, Cruz unveiled what is likely to be a theme of his campaign, urging voters to distinguish between talkers and actors. No one will say, “‘I’m a squishy moderate that stands for nothing,’” Cruz said. “Demand action, not talk.”
Cruz was tacitly referring to his uncompromising approach during last year’s government shutdown, when he attempted to prevent the funding of Obamacare before the program went into effect. The move generated tremendous animosity not only from Republican leadership but also from many otherwise sympathetic observers who considered the idea largely self-serving, a means to generate headlines and publicity.
“I do think we made some mistakes,” Cruz said, in response to a question from Club president David McIntosh. “I think that I and our allies did not spend enough time explaining the specific strategy to elite opinion makers, and I think there was some confusion that made it less effective.”
Cruz has never shown much of a liking for elites, but the Princeton-educated Supreme Court clerk got a standing ovation when he walked on stage tonight, and when he exited. He may recycle his lines, but the crowds – whoever they are – seem to like it.
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