Curb Your Authoritarianism? The 2016 Conventional Wisdom Thread (Elections, Part 6)

Cruz looked like he was savoring every second of that hate fest

Gotta say again how much I like David Axelrod. After being reminded that Scott Walker was the first to drop out: "He dropped out so early, he didn't even get a pejorative nickname from Donald Trump."

Sounds like Cruz won the support of Canadian schoolteachers but now has the entire party hating him.

That Cruz clip was insane, wow what a great heel turn

^^^^

when they cut to Trump walking in the building I really thought we were gonna get a Vince McMahon moment..."SAY MY NAME!! SAY MY NAME!!!!"

I was wondering when they wrestle

Even though I'm 97% sure that Trump (yet again) botched this tonight, going by all the talk on CNN, which is almost uniformly anti-Cruz (convention people, panelists, everyone), there's a small part that wonders if this was exactly what they wanted, a convenient villain--even Hillary hasn't been enough--to get anti-Trump Republicans on board. It would help explain the mystery of why they let him speak in the first place.

cruz has missed his calling as a manafort esque advisor - he could get a lot more done if he had just the self awareness to hide behind someone less openly repulsive

well he came close to making himself the leader of the anti-trump republicans

I half expected what happened to happen, only wish he took it further and straight up repudiated trump. it woulda been a gamble but it seems like something ted cruz and only ted cruz might do for attention.

xp

My theory: Cruz aimed to get Trump so riled up that tomorrow half his speech is just trashing Cruz. And who does that help in the end?

Trump even gets to be magnanimous (his Tweet--don't know how to embed them): "Wow, Ted Cruz got booed off the stage, didn't honor the pledge! I saw his speech two hours early but let him speak anyway. No big deal!"

if this whole thing ends up being a bad night out for republicans and they really do try to distance themselves from trump after the election whoever was there first looks best

otoh there is no certainty that the republican party isn't just gonna stay trumpy, it's not like they've learned from the last few elections

A fair number of republicans (~20%?) are ardently pro-Cruz, so vilifying Cruz is unlikely to have enough benefits among anti-Trump to offset decisively alienating those pro-Cruz voters.

cruz is gonna get such an erection later tonight from all that booing

"Heidi dear, let's pretend it's my birthday..."

In 2016, Cruz is playing the role of Rockefeller, and Marco Rubio (among others) is playing the role of Nixon. History suggests that the Nixon gambit is the smart one, since it’s the only way to win the voters who make up the largest bloc of the GOP right now. If Trump goes down to a massive defeat in November, Cruz and other non-endorsers will be blamed for stabbing the nominee in the back. They’ll be seen by party loyalists as the cause of the defeat. And they will have no future in national politics.

Marco Rubio all over the Nixon gambit.

http://newrepublic.com/article/135357/ted-cruz-made-terrible-mistake

cnn focus group of undecided voters: raise your hand if you think mike pence made a case for donald trump? (no one raises hand)
raise your hand if you have a more positive view of donald trump after tonight? (no one raises hand)

dana bash on cnn obviously has to work really hard not to laugh at the trump campaign as she reports on them

anyone thinks rubio has more of a future in the gop than cruz aint been paying very good attention

rubio been dead since he came out w some halfway moderate immigration ideas three years ago, that and generally hes just a total fn moron

+gops abt 4 months from pretending they never met trump

That new republic article is probably right that, by failing to endorse the chosen disaster of the party, Cruz has relegated himself to an also-ran for future national office (of which there are exactly two: prez + veep). But analogizing Rubio to Nixon seems rather far-fetched.

Prior to 1964, Nixon was a two-term VP and the Republican nominee for president in 1960. Rubio is a lightweight and a non-entity in comparison. He will always be a poor imitation of a junior senator, never a national figure.

cruz not endorsing trump will be an advantage in the next election

Twelve years later, President Rubio...

Really impossible to predict the future of the GOP now

Best part of this is HRC will announce a VP pick like first thing Friday morning.

yet impossible not to lol xp

A week of wall-to-wall miserable coverage for the Trump campaign, followed by HRC's shining moment with hopefully Not Tim Kaine

vp doesnt really matter yet still id like to see her pick some leftish rabblerouser

seizing the center is prob too irresistible to her tho cause thats just what she likes to do and its prob actually a good strategy this time

Aforementioned boring GOP college whites would rather see Vilsack or Kaine than Warren or I dunno Gavin Newsom true.

ya imo theres an opening for a perm shift if they capture those ppl this time, like the reagan democrats

man the more I think about cruz's gambit the more I think it was ridiculously smart and ballsy and it's only going to look better over time. walking in there, saying 'vote your conscience' on stage at trump's convention and then not endorsing him was basically out trumping trump.

boss move def

the real tell he was up to something is that he didn't even mention clinton

I'd like to think that, but I don't know, it's just not being received that way from everything I've seen (e.g., the CNN focus group mentioned above--that was stark).

its funny everyone was giving him shit for speaking since trump insulted his wife and dad but cruz just walked in there like an assassin gdamn

I guarantee you that's going to be the narrative people remember xp

the trump campaign could have used some cruz control tonight (TM)

ayoo

agree with everyone saying cruz made the right call tonight for his career. this campaign will only be remembered with embarrassment in future years

yeah I really dislike Cruz, for reasons both rational and irrational, but at the end of the day that was awesome

I mean most of the people in this thread feel like anyone who supported this campaign is going to be tarred for life (assuming he loses badly) so with that in mind what he did made perfect sense

Ted Cruz been looking into the abyss for years and it only just recently decided to look back at him

also it was nice to get a break from people shrieking about Hillary Clinton for a few minutes

The other thing is, Cruz hardly looked like a brilliant tactician during the primaries--the week leading up to his exit (Fiorina, the pact with Kasich) was as botched as anything I've ever seen. He's on equally shaky ground as a paragon of ethics and virtue: he spent the fall gushing over Trump (someone was reading quotes tonight). So even though I'm all for what he did tonight, I think it'll be remembered as a completely self-serving Hail Mary and the party will look elsewhere.

Losing the GOP nomination for president is historically an excellent way to later win the GOP nomination for president.

yuup

Losing the GOP nomination for president and supporting the guy who beat you, no matter how much you have to grit your teeth and cross your fingers, yes.

I don't know if there's any precedent to go by for what Cruz did tonight--the Rockefeller situation TNR cites seems close.

i think his motive here was as personal as it was political