Finally, some media outlets are beginning to catch on to what I’ve been saying for weeks, which is that there isn’t anything better about Ted Cruz than Donald Trump and that either man will be a complete disaster for the Republican Party’s brand and the office seekers who will have to share a ballot with them.
Alex Isenstadt wrote it up for Politico and it’s pretty much identical to the pieces that have been churned out about Trump for more than half a year now. The difference is that it drops the pretense that Cruz would be an improvement.
The news in the piece is that Alex Castellanos (the creator of the infamous Jesse Helms “White Hands” video) is trying to put together some billionaires to fund a carpet bombing campaign against Trump. You might remember Castellanos better from his 2000 work for the Bush campaign, including his subliminal rats commercial he ran criticizing Al Gore’s prescription drug plan. His body of work would easily send him to hell if hell were a real punishment for immoral inexcusable behavior.
In recent weeks, Alex Castellanos, a veteran TV ad man who was a top adviser to George W. Bush and Romney, has been meeting with top GOP operatives and donors to gauge interest in launching an anti-Trump vehicle that would pummel the Manhattan businessman on the television airwaves.
Those who’ve met with Castellanos say he’s offered detailed presentations on how such an offensive would play out. Castellanos has said that an anti-Trump ad campaign, which would be designed to cast him as a flawed strongman, would cost well into the millions. It was unclear, the sources said, whether Castellanos, who did not respond to a request for comment, would ultimately go through with the effort.
Even if Castellanos were the genius he seems to think he is, destroying Trump will avail nothing if it just results in Cruz getting the nomination. And intelligent Republicans understand this:
“At some point, we have to deal with the fact that there are at least two candidates who could utterly destroy the Republican bench for a generation if they became the nominee,” said Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “We’d be hard-pressed to elect a Republican dogcatcher north of the Mason-Dixon or west of the Mississippi.”
“Trump and Cruz are worrisome to most Republican candidates for governor, senator and Congress,” said Curt Anderson, a longtime GOP strategist and former Republican National Committee political director. “Some will say they are not worried, but they are.”
As I’ve also said repeatedly, however, I’m not seeing the savior who is supposed to be so much more acceptable to the American people.
For one thing, the GOP has kind of locked themselves into another base mobilization strategy. It worked, barely, in 2004, and probably thanks only to shenanigans in Ohio. It hasn’t worked in the last two presidential elections and seems less likely to work with each four-year passage of time.
But, if you’re stuck with base mobilization as your strategy, you have to at least mobilize your base. Who’s going to do that besides Cruz or Trump?
As I see it, their goose is cooked and their only hope is some kind of Black Swan situation where everything goes to shit at just the wrong time for the Democrats.
But you can’t bank on that, and if it happens, it probably doesn’t matter who the Republicans have nominated.
When these billionaires settle on a champion that will be more interesting than all these articles about how they don’t want the top two Republican contenders.
With all due respect, Booman, I appreciate what you write, but don’t really understand your seeming obsession with the way that the Grand Old Party is eating its young and how Donald Trump might be defeated. They broke it; now they’ve got to fix it. You know that old saw about how Democrats fall in love but Republicans fall in line? It’s actually fairly accurate. Think about just the last two presidential elections, say. People who knew that Sarah Palin was shockingly unqualified still got behind her. Four years later, evangelical Christians, who tend to regard the LDS Church as at best severely deviant & misguided, got behind a candidate who is not only a Mormon but one who has been prominent in the LDS Church.
So just watch: All those GOP governors allegedly terrified of Trump on top of the GOP ticket are sure as hell going to fall in line if The Donald becomes the nominee.
I think you’re suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome insofar as the GOP is concerned.
Now hang on:
“But, if you’re stuck with base mobilization as your strategy, you have to at least mobilize your base. Who’s going to do that besides Cruz or Trump?”
Think the answer is easy and obvious: Hillary! The GOP could throw up Bernie Sanders and their base would show up to punch HRC in the nose.
Almost certainly going to be Bush v Clinton, the usual not-a-hair’s-breadth-of-difference deal…and all this Trump, Cruz and Sanders nonsense will be the stuff of The Daily Show, just like Giuliani, Howard Dean, etc., etc.
Wonder if anyone has explained to Trump that as President he would no longer be able to oversee the Trump empire and just what the meaning of blind trusts is.
If the timing is right and the message gets across before the billionaires pony up the bucks, hope they read your piece on Rubio because they’re going to have to go a long ways down the list to find a winning horse once Trump, Cruz & Rubio are ditched.
Why would Trump be interested in a blind trust? Or not running his ‘businesses’? An outdated notion of historical decency? A desire to appear independent?
I used to think Trump didn’t want to be President because it would essentially be a demotion — crap pay, long hours, no real vacations, etc. But I’ve realized that GWB showed that none of that is real, and that a President can both work as hard as she wants to (or not!), and can use her office to make mucho bucks…Presidents have mostly profited from their time in office…
It’s called ‘conflict of interest’ and a blind trust is pretty much a necessity for a public official who doesn’t want to get caught up in that kind of issue. Trump’s holdings would easily set him up for continuous conflict of interest charges. Here’s a primer
It would seem that all the speculation and positioning of chess pieces on the GOP board by people like Castellanos is simply an attempt to anticipate events and to try and get ahead of the curve. While Trump appears to observers to be immovable from the top spot, the narrative is really still pretty fluid and no one will really know which way the political current will eventually flow until actual votes start rolling in from those early primary states. I don’t think it will take much to rejigger the whole GOP story-line, especially if Trump gets the BIG L (LOSER) tag tattooed on his forehead somewhere along the way.
Trump is one huge fragile bag of egocentric bullshit, and everyone knows it. He could easily fracture into a million pieces if there is a sense that his blood is in the water at some point. Once the sharks start circling he could easily become a flaming mess. And should the media start reporting and highlighting his thin-skinned personality, what is now often portrayed as triumphant and entertaining bloviating could quickly become a millstone around his neck.
Which is what I think Ted Cruz is banking on happening. Castellanos and his gang of concerned billionaires better be careful what they ask for. They just might get it. And once they shoot their wad bringing down the Trumpenstein, they are probably going to wish they had accumulated a bit more firepower in their arsenal to hold in reserve. Because they are going to wake up the next day and see Ted Cruz smiling ear to ear on their TV as the front-runner. They will then realize they still have a huge problem on their hands and not enough ammo to fight a second front against a disastrous nominee.
Trump is one huge fragile bag of egocentric bullshit,…
So far the same can be said for Carson, “oops,” Jindal, and Walker. And Jeb? isn’t far behind. No reason the same doesn’t apply to Cruz and Rubio who to date haven’t been subjected to vetting or attacks. Paul would be in the same position if his campaign had been taken seriously and Christie could be indicted before the primary season is over.
Democrats should really refrain from hoping/wishing any of these clowns get the nomination (how they cheered when GWB knocked out McCain) and begin constructing contingency plans to take out each of the possible nominees during the general election.
Should add that regardless of who ends up with the GOP nomination, the plan of attack against nominee Clinton is already being formulated and a goodly chunk of it will take Democrats by surprise and wholly off-guard.
I know. It’s like Democrats get so distracted by what seems to be the obvious and widespread lunacy on the GOP side that they seem to forget the lunacy actually has a pretty sizable appeal to a huge chunk of the electorate.
We always seem to want to believe that most everyone is rational and that these naked appeals to racism, xenophobia and reptilian tribal instincts will be judged as the horrible and inhumane things that they really are. Sadly, that rarely ever happens. We are surrounded by people for whom those things have a very basic appeal. For a lot of us, that is just a hard thing to comprehend. Me, I live in the middle of it and see it every day. So I am not the least bit surprised.
Really? Like what? Whitewater, Jodie Foster, Bills zipper, Genifer Flowers, BEHGHAZI!!!?
I’m prepared to think that there are skeletons in the closet that haven’t yet come out.
But really, Marie, don’t you think you should mention some of them rather than sounding like Cruz and Trump with vague hints of “… more to come …” and ” you ain’t seen nothing yet”.
Requires a devious, amoral, and cruel mind to come up with the effective garbage that the GOP and rightwing can and does dish out. Unfortunately, I don’t possess such a mind, and therefore, can note and remind those on the left side of the aisle that ability of the GOP and rightwing to do this again and again.
Tell me, did you recognize that the “swiftboat” attacks could become so effective when it first surfaced in the Spring of ’04? I didn’t.
All the old Clinton stuff they’ve been tossing out for the past year could be just to feed their savages. It could also be decoys for DEMs to waste their time dismissing and lull them into a false sense of complacency.
Trump has already set up a narrative on Libya — it’s a failed state. And unlike Syria, the GOP didn’t actually go on record in public in support of that regime change. Properly set up with her “we came …” could hurt — a lot.
No risk of sleazy “sweetheart” deals with the Clinton Foundation? I’d also be concerned about the relationship with Epstein — may not be anything there, but it’s one of the uglier sex abuse cases out there, so …
So, in other words, you have no idea at all what could possibly be coming down the pike?
You just want everyone to know (just sayin’) that its gotta be something.
You might be right. You probably are right. But why are you carrying their water?
I’m merely going on record. Sort of like I did during the 2000 election when I said that if elected, GWB would have us in another war with Iraq or later and in the lead-up to the Iraq War when I said that Saddam didn’t have any WMD. That way when events/truths emerge and those that were duped act all stunned and come out with their “who could have known/predicted” excuse making, I can tell them to shove it.
btw — in 2008 when those in the Clinton camp raised Rev Wright, “whitey,” Bill Ayres, as well as questions about Obama’s birth and the color of his skin as factors that would cause him to the lose in the general election, none of that seemed material enough to me to defeat him.
I see obsession with what Clinton allegedly did in the 90s isn’t just a GOP thing.
Don’t think that just because the red meat for the base is their favorite line of attack means that she’s inoculated. They can hit Clinton relentlessly on her flip-flops and her untrustworthiness. She does the former a lot, which undoubtedly leads to the latter number. When the GOP starts running ads back-to-back that has Hillary Clinton saying in a couple of weeks “I am a progressive” and “I am guilty of being a moderate”, what do you think will be the effect on the electorate?
If Cruz somehow won the GOP nomination, HRC could win the House in a sleepwalk without doing anything different from what she’s already doing.
HRC winning the House would completely destroy this incarnation of the GOP. Their only viable long-term strategy is to depress turnout and their best way to depress turnout is through disillusionment and gridlock.
If I was a GOPer bigwig, I’d rather have Trump than Cruz. The only >5% candidate who would cause more short-term damage than Cruz is Carson. And you could make a good case that Cruz would still be more damaging.
Just posted on DKOS: The cross tabs from the Field Poll in California are AMAZING.
Trump has 85% unfavorables among Hispanics, African Americans and those under 30.
This just in: When you hate on people, they tend to hate you back.
If I were team Trump I’d be working on how to expose Cruz and Rubio and drive up their unfavorables instead of running ads of fleeing Moroccan refugees.
This is the ironic peril that the GOP has perpetrated on the American public. Thanks, guys.
I think the Republicans are having an over-reaction. Cruz will be bad for the Republican downballot and Trump probably bad (I think Trump is something of a wild card and could help them too). But the voting public has short memories and by 2018 all will be forgotten, just as Bush’s reign of error caused no trouble for the Republicans in 2010.
The only way this will significantly trouble them is if they get a rout in 2016 bad enough to give the House to the Dems. That would give the Dem nominee 2 years to actually do things, which could have substantial implications down the line. I’d expect the Republicans to still get back the Congress in 2018, though.
I don’t under-estimate the ability of the GOP and its followers to completely pivot position-wise. Meaning I don’t think Cruz is the disaster so many of us think he will be.
Hell, we elected Dick Nixon. Twice. Does anyone really doubt that with enough turd-polish, Ted Cruz can be made appealing to something like 50% of the electorate? I don’t. Hell, John McCain demagogued his own immigration bill!
We make the mistake of projecting our values onto them. We have shame. They do not. And when people are scared, shame isn’t going to hold a lot of weight…
Cruz would be bad enough to give the House to the Dems. The Democratic nominee needs about a 7% popular vote advantage to win the House. Obama got 4% in 2012. Passive demographic growth would’ve made that around 5.5-6% if it was 2016. I don’t think HRC could improve much on that if she was facing a Romney or Bush, but Cruz would definitely do the trick.
Cruz’s positions are absolutely toxic and what’s more he’s shown no real interest in reigning them in. But unlike Trump, he doesn’t king in any new demographics.
If the Democratic Party can’t win the House with Cruz at the GOP helm, then I’ve just lost all hope for this bungling organization.
I believe Booman’s estimate was a 7% gain from 2012 not a 7% advantage overall. This is a tall order, although doable with favorable tailwinds.
I’m not using Booman’s estimate, I’m using Sam Wang’s. He claimed that in 2012 the Democratic Party needed about a 7% generic vote advantage to recapture the House.
I think that it’s doable in 2016, but not if we run the usual formula of social liberalism + economic centrism. Not unless the GOP implodes in a certain way, which a Cruz nomination would.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/the-great-gerrymander-of-2012.html?pagewanted=all
So are you ready to admit you were wrong about Cruz?
I went to a Ted Cruz rally — and saw James Dobson, Steve King, white evangelical fervor and the scariest family band of all time
Now I understand why Cruz is winning Iowa. You would too if you saw this band sing “I Wish Kids Prayed in School”
QUINT FORGEY
WEDNESDAY, JAN 6, 2016 03:15 PM CST
WINTERSET, Iowa — Those in the overwhelmingly white, senior audience at Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s rally here left with little doubt as to why the Texas senator is dominating the state’s much-sought-after evangelical constituency.
Standing alongside conservative-values author and commentator James Dobson, Cruz swapped out his usual stump for an exchange that blended scripted sermonizing with red-meat fighting words against Democrats he said are fixated on abolishing religious liberty.
“If we allow non-believers to elect our leaders, we shouldn’t be surprised when our government doesn’t reflect our values,” Cruz said to widespread applause.
Cruz called for increased voter turnout among evangelical caucus-goers, using the type of overtly religious rhetoric that has galvanized support from social conservatives and propelled family-values candidates such as Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum to first-place Iowa finishes in 2008 and 2012.
Cruz asked that attendees pray for him by asking for peace for his campaign, for the wisdom granted to the Biblical Solomon and for the well-being of his daughters, Caroline and Catherine.
“That they know at every moment that they’re loved by their mom and dad and they are loved by their father in heaven, and that they maintain a spirit of joy and peace, as well,” Cruz said.
Cruz currently leads all other Republicans in Iowa and has cracked the 30 point level in most poll averages – more than three points ahead than second-place finisher Donald Trump.
I will continue to say this.
THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRUMP AND THE REST OF THE GOP FIELD..
with the exception that he doesn’t speak in dogwhistles.
………………………………………..
Now you can worry: Trump’s in it to win it, so it’s time to drop fantasy that his campaign is all for show
With two bold new moves, Trump’s campaign shows once and for all that it is no joke. The Donald wants to win.
ELIAS ISQUITH
For most of the second-half of 2015, whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is “serious” (definition: unclear) was arguably the question of American politics.
It was asked after his launch speech, which was rambling, incoherent, demagogic, and way too long; it was asked after he criticized Sen. John McCain for being captured by the Vietcong; it was asked after he proposed “rounding up” and deporting some 11 million undocumented immigrants; it was asked after he attacked Fox News darling Megyn Kelly; it was asked after he proposed banning Muslims from entering the U.S.; it was asked again, and again, and again.
Slowly but surely, more and more commentators began to realize that the answer was yes. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was “serious” — at least in so far as “serious” was equivalent to “capable of winning.” The national polls showed it, the state-level polls showed it, the issue-based polling showed it. By the holiday season, elite endorsements, pricey ad buys, and an expensive big data/GOTV apparatus were the only usual components of a “serious” campaign that Trump 2016 lacked.
……………………
You probably have heard about the first one, which is the release of Trump’s first bona fide campaign commercial. It wasn’t the first video the Trump campaign put out — they spent much of 2015 getting attention with cheeky Instagram clips — but it was the campaign’s first television ad. Even more importantly, Trump announced he was going to actually spend millions of dollars to ensure voters in Iowa and New Hampshire saw it. ($2 million per week, if Trump is to be believed, which he isn’t.)
The second and far more important development, meanwhile, was made public by a recent Politico report, which claimed that Trump was not only spending money on a big data/GOTV apparatus — but that he’d been doing so for months already. The details about the program were admittedly fuzzy; none of the major operators involved agreed to speak on-the-record. But as Politico rightly noted in its report, the implications of Trump’s investment were clear: