Bridget reported on the Houston Chronicle’s turnabout on Sen. Ted Cruz last night while I was away watching a swarm of bats fly over a football field. The Chronicle had endorsed Cruz last year, but now rescinds its endorsement after Cruz led the fight to kill Obamacare over the past few weeks.
“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 editorialized last year.
The first sentence in that passage is evidence that the Chronicle had either already lost the plot, or it was trying to wedge Cruz into its own vision of a successful Texas senator. Neither speaks very well of the paper’s editors.
Ted Cruz did not run for the Senate to “succeed Kay Bailey Hutchison.” At all. That’s not a slight on KBH, who though she was a shade too centrist at times, was mostly a very good senator. She doesn’t get enough credit for her work on foreign policy. But Cruz certainly did not run to follow her or emulate the examples of Bentsen and Johnson. Especially Johnson, whose crookedness remains as toxic as his love of massive government. Ted Cruz might be the antithesis of LBJ in every way possible. LBJ was an old-school election thief; Cruz is squeaky clean. LBJ grew government by waging a government-centric “war on poverty,” while Cruz believes in the power of the free market. LBJ made deals by terrorizing people and lording his power over them; Cruz appeals to logic and reason. There just aren’t any similarities between Johnson and Cruz at all. LBJ wouldn’t even win an honest election here today, though he could surely steal his way into office as long as the Obama administration keeps blocking voter ID.
Cruz ran to represent Texas values in Washington, to keep Washington’s corruption out of Texas as much as possible, to shake things up, and to get our nation back on a sound fiscal footing. What part of that did the Chronicle misunderstand? Cruz ran, quite explicitly, to destroy Obamacare. He traveled all over this huge state for years, telling everyone who would listen that getting rid of Obamacare was his goal. He wasn’t quiet about it. Apparently the Chronicle missed it in the thousands of speeches and comments Cruz made all over the state during the more than two years he built up his campaign. Maybe the paper’s editorial board needs to get out of Houston a little more often and get in touch with the state’s grassroots.
Texans like myself voted for Cruz because we believed that he would go to Washington and do what he said he would do. And he has.
It’s refreshing to see an elected official who does exactly what he clearly said he would do.
The Chronicle’s turncoat editorial pretty much misses every reason that Texas did not elect another status quo senator.
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.
Shorter Chronicle: We miss the tasty pork!
Don’t get me wrong, most of NASA is not pork. It’s one of the few government agencies that’s worth anything, and Obama has mistreated it at least in part to spite Texas and the Chronicle’s own home city. But Cruz, again, did not go to Washington to just be another bacon king. (Houston used to have Ron Paul for that!) He went there to change how Washington does business. He went there to roll back government. Ted Cruz is doing a reverse Davy Crockett: He went to Hell to fight for Texas.
The Houston Chronicle should be cheering him on.
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