Wednesday, May 4, 2016

End of the road for Ted Cruz; suspends campaign


Bloomberg/Getty Images
This image of Ted Cruz was taken the day before Indiana primary day;   but defeat is written all over his face and posture.    He knew that Indiana was the make-or-break state for him, after his multiple losses of the last six primaries in less friendly territory.

But conservative, religious, straight-shooting, All-American Indiana?   If Cruz can't win in Indiana, then nobody is buying what he's peddling anymore.   Despite pulling out all the stops of hard campaigning and desperate measures, he lost to Donald Trump 53% to 37%.   In less than two hours after polls closed, Cruz announced that he was suspending his campaign.

As Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine put it:
"Republicans across the country have watched Cruz take the fight to Trump, and concluded that they really dislikedCruz.    The Texas senator has seen his favorable ratings plummet, while Trump’s have spiked upward."
 Perhaps a personality transplant and a soul transplant would help.   His brain is fine.   His debate skills are unsurpassed.   It's who he is and what he says and his constant lies that defeat him.   No one has played the religious piety card more than Cruz has in this campaign.   And yet, he's even losing the evangelical vote in Indiana to Donald Trump.

That's amazing.   Except. maybe not.  From the beginning, I have felt that Cruz's religiosity is fake.  It just feels fake.  So maybe it's not that evangelicals don't caremaybe they just don't believe him anymore.

Let's hope he does some deep reflection and reassessment and that he can become a decent human being -- for the sake of his two little girls, who have been shamelessly exploited by their parents in this campaign.   It's hard for me to imagine how someone, who is so crassly manipulative and so blatantly dishonest and mean and universally despised, could be a good father.   I hope I'm wrong about that.

Ralph

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