Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Ted Cruz's Real Game

I know we are all supposed to be a little shocked at Ted Cruz and his reckless actions over the continuing resolution.  And defunding Obamacare.  What happens if the American people blame the Republicans, again, for shutting down the government?

Let's relax, shall we?  My guess is that nobody will remember much about the Fall of 2013, except that Ted Cruz stuck a stake in the ground and fought against Obamacare.

Today, the energetic Michelle Malkin puts the Obamacare issue front and center, with "Obama Lied, My Health Plan Died."  Yep, our Michelle is self-employed, so her health plan recently sent her a letter telling her that her health plan won't be available next year under full Obamacare.  So Obama's central promise that, if you like your health plan you get to keep it, is a lie.

Of course it was a lie.  Anyone could have seen that coming.  But America's women are trusting souls.  They believe it when someone tells them that they can keep their health plan.

In a grand strategic sense, I assert that women are coming of age with the Obama era.  Up to now, in the era that women have had the vote, they have never got royally screwed.  They got the vote, the little darlings, they got to abort their babies if the father didn't step up to the mark.  They got to divorce men that didn't turn out too good.  They got to come out into the working world and compete for jobs with men, and even got the legal system to put a finger on the scales of justice in their favor.  They got Medicare to take care of their mothers.  They got dozens of welfare programs to take care of them if their "partner" didn't step up to the mark.

But health care is where women live.  Health care is what women talk about when they are together.  Health care is what women worry about.

What women want, of course, is unlimited high-quality health care for them and their children and their mothers at an affordable cost, so naturally, that is what Candidate and President Obama promised them.  What Obamacare is suddenly giving them is mediocre health care at an astronomical cost.

And the average LoFo woman voter is just now beginning to find that out.

In the next two years we are going to see an electoral earthquake, and at the center of it will be angry, scorned women compared to which Hell hath no fury.

Ted Cruz is running for president on the assumption that the rightmost 60 percent of the 2016 voters will be looking for a tough, no nonsense street fighter.  As the two political armies march towards the climactic Battle of 2016 Ted Cruz is turning up at all the meaningless skirmishes, the minor contests at which a few people get clobbered and the march resumes the next day.  Ted is turning up at the skirmishes, bravely leading the troops, demonstrating to all and sundry that he is the man to lead the great army that will be brought to strategic concentration in 2016.

Now imagine what it would mean if all those waffling soccer moms and security moms and America's-First-Black-President moms of the last 20 years became, in 2016, raging healthcare moms.

But what about divisiveness?  Is Ted Cruz too divisive to win those LoFo moderates?

To those of you worried about Ted Cruz being too divisive and not enough of a team player, we old geezers that were around in the 1970s have something to tell you.

Back in the 1970s Ronald Reagan was considered by all sensible people as a complete flake.  He was a right-winger; he was a B-movie actor; he was divisive; he was a puppet of his kitchen cabinet; he was ignorant.  And even libertarian-conservatives like me half bought the liberal line.

It all turned out to be rubbish, pure liberal moonshine.  A couple of telling points.  When they looked at Reagan's papers after his death they found that he had read all the classics, including Mises and Hayek.  They could tell that because the books were full of Reagan's annotations.  They also found that many of the weekly radio addresses he made between 1976 and 1978 were drafted in his own handwriting: so Reagan actually wrote them.  Imagine that!  Those Reagan radio addresses ran the gamut of presidential issues; you could say that Reagan was prepping for the presidency when he gave them, making sure that he had taken the trouble to at least develop a familiarity with the issues that would come across his presidential desk.  The tone of the addresses was brusque and slightly angry, a startling difference from the aw-shucks avuncular President Reagan that we learned to know and love after 1980.

One worrying thing about Reagan was that he didn't do well under questioning.  He didn't do well at presidential debates.  You felt that he really didn't have his answers down pat, and you worried that some liberal questioner would trip him up.  That helped advance the liberal line that Reagan wasn't really up to the job.

Ted Cruz is different.  In the first place he has been the brilliant student all his life, punching his ticket at all the prestigious way-stations on the elite liberal career track.  In the second place he is pitch-perfect on the split-screen TV interview.  Here he is on Sean Hannity.  Flawless.

I have a feeling that the combative Cruz is exactly what we in the GOP base are going to want in 2016.  We are like Dorothy's Aunt Em.  For twenty years we have wanted to tell liberals what we thought about them as they trashed every honorable conservative as a kook and an extremist.  Ted Cruz may be just the man to do it for us.  Only he'll do it so smooth that liberals won't know what is happening to them.

Not until after the health care moms of 2016 change US politics forever.

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