This morning he blasted Donald Trump for being soft on the bathroom issue.His is a shallow campaign, energetically devoted to winning votes on the cheap. He continues to ask the very least of the same America he wants to lead.
“Gosh, he thought that men should be able to go into the girls’ bathroom if they want to,” he told a crowd hundreds strong in Frederick, Md., reports Washington bureau chief Todd Gillman. “Have we gone stark raving nuts?”
Trump’s offending comments? Earlier Trump had been asked about North Carolina’s ghastly law that, among other things, requires people to use a bathroom assigned to the gender that matches the one on their birth certificate. Trump said something eminently reasonable about the discriminatory law that has stirred up a nationwide backlash against North Carolina.
“There have been very few complaints the way it is,” he said. “People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate. There has been so little trouble. The problem with what happened in North Carolina is the strife and the economic punishment they are taking.”
Trump, working against type, stepped away from the crazy. But Cruz, endlessly on the lookout for the cheap and divisive, saw something besides trouble: He saw opportunity, and seized it with self-righteous zeal.
“Here is basic common sense. Grown adult men, strangers, should not be alone in bathrooms with little girls,” he told the crowd. “Have we gone stark raving nuts?”
It’s a flimsy, backward argument to begin with. Men and boys, and women and girls, have shared bathrooms for as long as public bathrooms have been in use. Having a transgender woman who was born a male step into a stall next to a girl in a public restroom is not grounds for panic.
But for Cruz, it seemed like a chance to make Trump look like an avatar of the fall of Western Civilization — and maybe a chance for a few extra votes. It’s entirely in keeping with Cruz’s performance as a senator and as a candidate for president.
He’s proved himself to be capable of saying nearly anything at anytime to win an argument, grab a spotlight, or score a vote.
Months ago, he was asked why he had stayed so quiet in the face of Donald Trump’s outrageous statements early in the campaign. I know you reporters want to start a fight, he would say with labored patience, but I honor Ronald Reagan’s commandment to never to criticize a fellow Republican.
Actually, he was just too scared — or too crafty — to cross Trump too soon, lest he suffer the fate of other candidates who objected, including what had happened to Rick Perry and would soon happen to Jeb Bush.
Proof came a few months later, when he (as usual) got out-maneuvered in the Senate by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Frustrated, he lashed out and called McConnell a liar right on the Senate floor, sending shock waves across the capital.
No wonder Rep. Peter King of New York told reporters just ahead of the Tuesday’s primary that Cruz’s performance as senator has led him to believe he’d never be able to bring this country together as president. “I hate Ted Cruz and I think I’ll take cyanideif he ever got the nomination,” he added.
That’s only slightly less poetic (and hyperbolic) than Sen. Lindsey Graham’s statement at the annual congressional dinner. “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody could convict you,” he said.
He’s since lined up behind Cruz, but even so, he’s still arguing that John Kasich would be a better president.
Cruz has spent his time in the Senate playing the role of obstructionist. When he shut the government down over Obamacare, his own party denounced him as foolish and conceded the effort was futile. But Cruz had a response: It was good for getting votes, he replied.
I asked him once whether he was worried that his constant positioning as the leader of a movement had left Texas with just one senator willing to do the work they were hired to do. His response: Not at all. The bigger the bombs he sets off in the Senate, the more people back home love him.
Now he wants to be president, a job usually understood to be particularly ill-suited for a bomb-thrower.
To win, he’s asking the mainstream Republican Party to rally to his cause. “Join me now on this journey of less talk and more actions, and real solutions,” Cruz said in Pennsylvania, where he’s almost certain to got smashed again next week.
Neither party elders nor GOP voters en masse are answering that call. He’s so far behind Trump that there is virtually no chance he can catch him before the convention in Cleveland this summer. Instead, he’s deployed teams of lawyers looking to scavenge delegates across the country in the hopes that by the summer he’ll be able to make with a straight face an appeal for the party to unite behind him.
This post was written by: Raymond Jack
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