Ted Cruz Quietly Seeks Peace With GOP's Big Spenders

[Formerly Once-Ler]

http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/ted-cruz-quietly-seeks-peace-with-gop-s-big-spenders-20141215

The Texas Republican has traveled to both coasts in the hopes of winning over skeptical donors.

December 15, 2014 There's a downside to digging in. Just ask Ted Cruz.

Since being elected to Congress in 2012, the Texas Republican has established himself as a conservative icon. On everything from spending fights to immigration policy and social issues, Cruz has been a powerful and reliable voice of the far right. His push last year to defund Obamacare—which shuttered the government—cemented his image as an uncompromising champion of the tea party.

But now, as he prepares a presidential bid, Cruz needs to round out the rough edges. While his confrontations on Capitol Hill continue to energize the activist class, his reputation as an ideologically driven renegade is scaring off a key set of influentials: the major Republican donors needed to finance a winning presidential campaign.+

"I get the impression that Ted Cruz appeals almost exclusively to the far right of the base, and that he has not attempted to really reach out either to his colleagues in the Senate or to donors who are not in that group," said Fred Malek, a top Republican fundraiser who chaired Sen. John McCain's finance operation in 2008.

The foundation of a Cruz presidential campaign looks solid. He has brought in strong organizational talent. His alliances are multiplying in the early nominating states. And his standing among the grassroots has never been better. But one important area remains a source of concern: fundraising.

It's a vulnerability Cruz is working to address. Earlier this month, the senator slipped away to Los Angeles for a series of meetings with top GOP donors, a trip that included a dinner at the California Club with a group of some 20 Republicans who served as bundlers for Mitt Romney in 2012.

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt moderated the event, and said many of the attendees—whom he described as "Steve Forbes Republicans"—came away impressed. "There were blunt electability questions," Hewitt said. By the time Cruz departed the dinner, he added, "they were all very, very pleasantly surprised."

Hewitt declined to repeat Cruz's argument for his own electability, but said: "He's in the process of proving to people that he's more Reagan than Goldwater. Opponents of his want to stick the Goldwater tag on him, so his challenge is proving that he's more Reagan than Goldwater."

The California swing came on the heels of a whirlwind tour through Manhattan in late November, which included a lengthy one-on-one meeting with GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson. Cruz aimed in both trips to correct what he calls a media-driven "caricature" of himself—one that took hold last year after he spearheaded a strategy to defund the Affordable Care Act that ultimately led to a government shutdown.

Despite the recent coastal visits, Cruz's charm offensive begins in his own backyard, with some of the same Texas donors who shunned him two years ago.

Cruz shocked the political world in 2012 with his primary victory over Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, an establishment favorite who outraised Cruz by a ratio of more than 3-to-1. Conservative outside groups helped drive a flurry of small, out-of-state donations to Cruz, but he was walloped among large-dollar donors. That experience makes for an inspiring David-versus-Goliath tale, but it's not a winning model for a White House campaign. Team Cruz knows that grassroots enthusiasm can only take a candidate so far; to be viable for a party's presidential nomination, major donors must be in play.

"Sen. Cruz's team is more recently—like, within the last few months—reaching out more to the donors and business leaders and community leaders to start building those relationships," said Republican Rep. Kevin Brady, a veteran of the Texas delegation. "His first year was really spent building a national persona and image, and it's my impression that he's now laying the groundwork in Texas."

Brady said it will take time for Cruz to make inroads with these donors, but added that the senator has "a wonderful, not-so-secret weapon" at his disposal: his wife. Heidi Nelson Cruz is a top executive with Goldman Sachs; she also serves on the Greater Houston Partnership Board, an organization full of political contributors. "She's well-respected and has lots of admirers," Brady said. "So that could be part of the reaching out—whether it's Wall Street or Texas."

Brady, himself a master fundraiser with deep connections to the political spenders in Dallas and Houston, said the donor community has taken notice of the freshman senator's newfound interest in their campaign dollars.

Cruz's outreach, however, has not produced an instant conversion among the GOP's donor elite. Adelson found Cruz to be "too right wing," according the New York Observer. (Adelson later disputed that characterization, but it seemed to be a recurring theme during Cruz's swing through New York. At another meeting in Manhattan, he answered a similar assertion by saying: "I don't think I'm all that conservative.")

And the senator's latest confrontation on Capitol Hill—provoking a weekend session of Congress that was aimed at making a point on immigration but resulted in more of President Obama's nominees being confirmed—will only play into the negative stereotype that's scaring off potential financiers of Cruz's presidential campaign.

"His views, as well as his actions," Malek said, "are a lot further to the right than the mainstream of Republican donors."

Cruz's allies acknowledge that he isn't likely to win over most of these donors anyway; his record of intra-party troublemaking is disqualifying for many establishment Republicans looking for a quick, clean primary contest. What Cruz hopes to accomplish, then, is perhaps something less tangible—if not converting neutral players into loyal supporters, at least softening opposition to the point where an "anyone-but-Cruz" campaign never gets off the ground.

This article appears in the December 16, 2014 edition of NJ Daily.

Ya know the difference between a "real conservative" and a RINO?
One re-election.