Houston Chronicle Editorial Board Says It Regrets Cruz Endorsement

In October 2012, the Houston Chronicle endorsed Ted Cruz for Senate, calling him “one of the shooting stars of the 2012 election season.”

“We endorse Ted Cruz to succeed Kay Bailey Hutchison and join Sen. John Cornyn in the U.S. Senate. We do so in the expectation that Cruz will be schooled by the examples of previous senators from Texas, beginning with Hutchison and continuing with Lloyd Bentsen and Lyndon B. Johnson. In Cornyn, he will have a someone to emulate at his side. We expect Cruz as the senator from the Lone Star State to spend his energies standing up for Texans of every background and economic station, representing their best interests from health care and education to energy, space and medicine,” the Chronicle editorial board wrote.

Today, they basically took it back, framed in the context of how much they miss his predecessor, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas):

We’re not sure how much difference one person could make in the toxic, chaotic, hyperpartisan atmosphere in Washington, but if we could choose just one it would be Hutchison, whose years of service in the Senate were marked by two things sorely lacking in her successor, Ted Cruz.

For one thing, Hutchison had an unswerving commitment to the highest and best interests of Texas at all times. This revealed itself in a thousand different ways. Hereabouts, we miss her advocacy for NASA, the Port of Houston and the energy industry. And we know she worked just as hard for Dallas, San Antonio and a hundred smaller Texas cities and towns.

And dare we say it? We miss her extraordinary understanding of the importance of reaching across the aisle when necessary. Neither sitting Texas senator has displayed that useful skill, and both the state and the Congress are the poorer for it.

One reason we particularly believe that Hutchison would make a difference in these hectic days is that if she had kept her seat, Cruz would not be in the Senate.

The editorial stressed that the paper endorsed Cruz “with many reservations and at least one specific recommendation — that he follow Hutchison’s example in his conduct as a senator.”

“Obviously, he has not done so. Cruz has been part of the problem in specific situations where Hutchison would have been part of the solution,” the editorial continued. We feel certain she would have worked shoulder to shoulder with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in crafting a workable solution that likely would have avoided the government shutdown altogether. But we’ll never know.”