03-11-2016, 09:00 PM
You have to give it to the guy, making a strength out of his weakness (despised even by his own party in the senate and beyond)
Quote:But Cruz and Trump are in fact appealing to different segments of the Republican Party, and they know it. Trump is the candidate of the disoriented, the confused, the needy; Cruz is the candidate of the dogmatist, the moralist, the convicted. Trump gets the voters who fear and adore; Cruz gets the voters who hate and resent. Trump is all show; Cruz means what he says. Trump wants to be everybody’s daddy; Cruz wants to be everybody’s boss. Ted Cruz is much, much more dangerous than Donald Trump....A Most Hated Man | New Republic
“I’m a true conservative!” Cruz shouted. Suddenly I understood something about Ted Cruz and his followers that I hadn’t clicked into before: The proof of Cruz’s merit, as a candidate, was that he he ought to be at the bottom. The proof of being “a true conservative” is that everyone is against him. Being hated is a mark of entitlement. Friedrich Nietzsche made the argument about the triumph of “ascetic morality” and the Christian reevaluation of values 140 years ago in On the Genealogy of Morals. Imagine you feel oppressed by a culture and a political system that has consistently ignored you and the things you care about. (For today’s conservative, these values might include the definition of marriage as being “between a man and a woman,” the idea of an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, or that life begins at conception.) Now imagine someone promised to overturn all of the prevalent values of the day in favor of your own, opposing values....
It was only natural, indeed desirable that the media and the entire Republican Party had consistently fought against Ted Cruz, and he against them: He represents morality, which is the opposite of everyone at work in Washington today, everything we see in our degenerate age. But you, the voter, know what the truth is and so does God. That’s why Ted is winning against all odds. You feel resentment about the way this country is headed? So you should! Because the values represented by our leaders—even the values represented by the Republican Party—are the opposite of your values. You feel excluded, you feel ignored? You feel bullied, even hated? So do I!
Unsurprisingly, Glenn Beck is a tremendous public speaker. He appeals to the intellect like a talented elementary school teacher. “For the past 20 years we’ve really screwed up. It’s our fault: We keep sending clowns to Washington.” He was heavy on textbook U.S. history: Thomas Paine and George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Pearl Harbor. What does he love about Ted Cruz? “Everybody in the press hates your guts!” There was wild applause and shouting. “Everybody on the Democratic side hates your guts! And all of your so-called friends hate your guts!” All of your friends hate your guts?! I looked around, astonished, but the crowd was electrified. Everyone was on their feet, applauding and shouting. This was one of my favorite things about Ted Cruz’s campaign so far: He has made his persistent unpopularity—well-known even here in Iowa, a long way from Harvard, Princeton, or Washington, D.C.—one of his most winning strengths.