George Will on Ted Cruz:
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was born in 1970, six years after events refuted a theory on which he is wagering his candidacy. The 1964 theory was that many millions of conservatives abstained from voting because the GOP did not nominate sufficiently deep-dyed conservatives. So if in 1964 the party would choose someone like Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, hitherto dormant conservatives would join the electorate in numbers sufficient for victory.
This theory was slain by a fact — actually, 15,951,378 facts. That was the difference between the 43,129,566 votes President Lyndon Johnson received and the 27,178,188 that Goldwater got in winning six states.
The sensible reason for nominating Goldwater was not because he could win: As Goldwater understood, Americans still recovering from the Kennedy assassination were not going to have a third president in 14 months. The realistic reason was to turn the GOP into a conservative weapon for a future assault on the ramparts of power.
There’s absolutely no good reason — short- or longterm, win or lose — for the GOP to nominate Jeb Bush. If nominated, he would likely be a disaster. If elected, he would likely be worse, cementing in the rot at the national party level.
While I sometimes wonder about Cruz’s tactical political judgement, it’s possible to imagine him as a Goldwater-type party reformer. The party is luck though in that it also has Rubio, Jindal, perhaps Paul, and others who could do the same job — and maybe with better odds of actually winning.
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