The headline is quite misleading; nowhere in the interview did I get the impression that Cruz will endorse Trump ... not even close!
Ted Cruz contemplates the unthinkable...“In this election I am where a great many voters are, which is that I am listening and watching and coming to a decision,” Cruz, the highest-profile Trump holdout heading into this week’s convention, told me when I asked him if he intended to throw his support behind the former reality TV star imminently.
Cruz, speaking to POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast on the eve of the Republican National Convention, was in a reflective mood about his second-place finish (“I don't know that I'm in a position to give campaign advice to Donald Trump, given that he just whipped me in a primary,” he said with a rueful laugh), but there was an unmistakably defiant edge to his pre-Cleveland mind-set, and his criticisms of Trump were veiled but vivid....
...Cruz wouldn’t talk specifically about what he plans to say — it’s sure to include a healthy portion of attacks on Hillary Clinton — but he made it clear that his goals extend well beyond getting Trump elected.
“Most wars are not won in a single battle,” said Cruz, who is still paying campaign staff to plan and to create a detailed post-mortem of the 2016 primaries (one thing he’s looking at, I’m told: whether his “New York values” quip about Trump was a blunder).
“What I’m looking forward to is changing the course this country is on. I don’t know if that happens in this election cycle or not,” he added. ...
...The odds are that Cruz will have to endorse Trump sooner or later, even if he holds out beyond this week, simply because no Republican can afford the perception that they didn’t do everything in their power to stop the hated Clinton from winning the election.
Yet one of the reasons Cruz has held out this long (apart from his curdled-milk relationship with a man who falsely linked his father with JFK’s assassin, insulted his wife and all but accused him of womanizing) is leverage. Trump needs “Lyin’ Ted” a whole lot more than Cruz needs him as this point, which is why he ceded a central prime-time slot to someone who is so lukewarm to him. There weren’t enough Cruz supporters to put him over the top, but his numbers are simply too good for Trump to ignore. The first-term senator won 8 million votes, 600 delegates and 12 states. He raised nearly $92 million — a record for a GOP primary candidate, much of it from small online donors. He ran by far the best ground operation of any GOP campaign this year, with more than 325,000 volunteers flocking to Cruz’s call for a grass-roots Republican renewal....
...As the interview went on, I noticed a barely discernible but noteworthy shift in Cruz’s tone — he wasn’t using the word “Republican” as much as he had in the late primaries when he was vying to become the party’s mainstream standard-bearer.
I asked him if that was intentional. It was.
“I think people are furious with politicians in both parties,” he said. “I care a heck of a lot more about America than I do about any political party. If the Republican Party stands for individual liberty, if we defend the Bill of Rights, if we stand for keeping this country safe, then we deserve to win, and if we don’t, we deserve to lose.”Read more:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/ted-talks-hes-not-ready-to-endorse-yet-225690#ixzz4EmZTL3CmFollow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook
