Is Cruz Our Best Hope?
The buzz these days is that Senator Ted Cruz from Texas will run for president in 2016. His name is not exactly a household word today, but Ted Cruz could become the most important political leader of the 21st century. Does that sound too bold? Consider the situation.
America is the last best hope of ordered liberty and the Judeo-Christian moral tradition surviving. It is much less important to have two or three presidential terms under men like Bush, Dole, Bush, McCain, and Romney -- the presidential nominees since Reagan left office -- than one or two presidential terms under a transformative conservative leader who intends to reclaim the nobility and virtue or America and create in our nation a model which the rest of the world can see.
Reagan did that, and although there are many differences between Reagan and Cruz, in important areas, there are encouraging similarities. Reagan and Cruz both grasp the deadly moral and mental toxin of Marxism. The sins of the left, from ObamaCare to a destructively high progressive income tax to the myriad categories of notionally aggrieved classes requiring preferred treatment by government, are all rooted in Marxism.
Ted Cruz, as noted by Matthew Vadum in American Thinker on March 5, correctly and courageously talks about the Marxist domination of Harvard Law School. Few conservatives and even fewer Republicans are willing to be that blunt and that clear. Go back a few decades in American political history.
Gerald Ford in his 1976 foreign policy debate with Carter was so eager to pussyfoot around the issue of Marxist evil that he famously stated that the Soviet Union had not dominated Poland. Compare that craven surrender to political correctness with Ronald Reagan as president calling the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire."
Reagan was simply telling the truth, but the whole gaggle of establishment leftism went nuts. In 1983, when Reagan liberated Grenada from a Marxist thug, the anti-anti-Communist left could barely restrain their sputtering rage. Throughout Reagan's presidency, he followed this strategic policy: "How about this? We win. They lose."
Ted Cruz knows all about the horrors of Marxism and understands as most of us could not why ending Marxism in Grenada was noble. Cruz's father, who had been tortured by Fidel Castro's predecessor, Batista, and who supported Castro's revolution, left Cuba before Castro came to power, thoroughly disillusioned with that dissembling Marxist thug.
Cruz also is a fabulous communicator and articulator of conservative principles. Professor Alan Dershowitz, not noted for his historic sympathy for conservatism, said of his days at Harvard Law School, "Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant." He won several different awards as the best student speaker in America, and Cruz was semi-finalist in the 1995 World Universities Debating Championship.
He is a very effective and unflappable communicator of conservative values, and while no one was Reagan but Reagan, Ted Cruz is the best articulator of conservative values at the national level since Reagan. Like Reagan, his skills are not simply winning debating points for championing transcendent ideals.
Cruz, like Reagan, appears in office to be as sincere as when he sought conservative votes. He joined with senators Lee and Paul to stop by filibuster the "compromise" gun control bill which Pat Toomey, a Republican who ran as a conservative, offered with Joe Manchin.
Unlike some Republican Hispanics, Cruz is also just as stout on illegal immigration, but he is an Hispanic, fluent in Spanish, growing up as an Hispanic in Texas. There is no doubt that he could relate to Hispanic voters in a way that no Republican presidential candidate has been able to do. Given his Texas home and his Cuban background, this would help with just the Hispanic voters which Republicans need to win nationally: Cuban-Americans in Florida and Mexican-Americans in nearby Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.
It is early, of course, and much may change in the next three years, but everything about Ted Cruz points to the sort of great conservative champion who will slay the dragons of Marxist myth and leftist cant. That is what our nation -- and the world -- desperately needs.