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Opinion
Reece Terry, publisher
Mark Boehler, editor
4A • Sunday, November 15, 2015
Corinth, Miss.
Why Ted Cruz gets no respect Ted Cruz gets no respect. At least no respect in keeping with the impressiveness of the campaign he’s built and his increasing odds of winning the Republican nomination. The press and the political class are beginning to catch on to Cruz’s strength, and there has been more talk of a prospective Cruz-Marco Rubio race during the past two Rich weeks, but his coverage and Lowry his buzz have been lagging indicators — and they are still National lagging. Review After Tuesday night’s GOP debate in Milwaukee, a Politico survey of Republican insiders had as many respondents saying Cruz won (6 percent) as Ben Carson and John Kasich (6 percent each). This is an extraordinary finding, given that Kasich showed up for the debate wearing a suicide vest. Cruz tends to be an afterthought in the Sunday show chatter, and on TV generally. A Washington Post analysis specifically looked at the amount of cable TV coverage devoted to each candidate compared with his or her position in the polls. It found that Cruz got 60 percent less coverage than you’d otherwise expect from July through October. Donald Trump, as you might expect, gets more coverage than warranted by his polling. So does Jeb Bush. It’s as though the media still haven’t been able to adjust the level of coverage of the former Florida governor to account for his diminished stature in the race. The indications of the strength of Cruz’s operation and the shrewdness of his positioning are mounting. He had more cash on hand at the end of the third quarter than any other Republican. He has major super PAC backing. He assessed the anti-establishment mood in the party more accurately than any of the other traditional Republican candidates. He reacted to the rise of Trump very deftly for his purposes. He has seen a couple of key potential competitors, Scott Walker and Rand Paul, either hit a wall or badly underperform. He has a discernible ideological and geographic base. He has, relatedly, a path to the nomination that is simple and intuitive (win Iowa, consolidate the right and beat an establishment that might be too fractured and unpopular to prevail). He lights up pretty much every conservative audience he addresses. He is an excellent debater, and he simply doesn’t make tactical or rhetorical mistakes. And yet, while many of these qualities are duly noted, he doesn’t really get his due. Why? The political press corps made up its mind about him — too divisive — as soon as he showed up in Washington, and has never entirely gotten over its dismissiveness about his campaign. Cruz has never mounted a John McCainstyle charm offensive with reporters, most of whom, it is safe to say, find him personally off-putting. The appeal of Cruz’s conservative populism is lost on most reporters and political insiders, who have a natural reflex to roll their eyes at the message and the messenger. Cruz is not as interesting as Trump and Carson, and he doesn’t feature in any personal drama like the Bush-Rubio mentormentee showdown. Finally, he is graded on a bit of a curve. He routinely performs so well at Republican cattle calls that his standing ovations tend to get discounted. Cruz is hardly a cinch. Trump and especially Carson are significant obstacles for him in Iowa. His theory that he will inherit Trump and Carson’s support if the outsiders deflate is too simplistic. So is his schematic of the Republican race as coming down to two candidates, one representing the conservatives (him) and someone representing the moderates. Nonetheless, it should be obvious to any fair observer that Cruz is a serious threat for the nomination. Be warned, and get over it. (Daily Corinthian columnist Rich Lowry can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com.)
Prayer for today My Father, help me to speak the truth and guard the truth, that righteousness may be an abiding influence in my life. Amen.
A verse to share But your hearts must be fully committed to the LORD our God, to live by his decrees and obey his commands, as at this time.” — 1 Kings 8:61
Can Europe survive this invasion? “A modern day mass migration is taking place ... that could change the face of Europe’s civilization,” warned Hungarian President Viktor Orban. “If that happens, that is irreversible. ... There is no way back from a multicultural Europe,” said Orban. “If we make a mistake now, it will be forever.” Orban acted on his beliefs. He erected a 110-mile fence on the Serb border, redirecting hundreds of thousands of migrants away from Hungary to Croatia, thence to Austria and Germany. Sunday, after a third of a million had passed through, Croatia replaced a centerleft with a rightist party. A fortnight ago, the rightwing eurosceptic Law and Justice Party won a landslide victory in Poland. Support for Angela Merkel, who has opened Germany to a million migrants, is plummeting. Bavaria’s CSU, sister party of Merkel’s CDU, is in rebellion. Bavaria has been the main port of entry for the hundreds of thousands of arriving migrants. Europe is undergoing the greatest mass migration since World War II, when 14 million Germans were driven out of Prussia and eastern Germany and Central and Eastern Europe. The routes – through Turkey to the Balkans on land, or across a few miles of the Med to the Greek islands, or from Libya to Lampedusa
and Sicily, or into the Spanish enclaves on the Moroccan coast, or out to the Canary Pat Islands – are Buchanan arduous but not imposColumnist sible. W h y should they not come? Why should Arabs and Africans not flee the tyranny, terror, poverty and war that are their lot to come to Europe, live the good life, and have life’s necessities provided for their families by the munificent welfare states of northern Europe? And what is to stop them? Jean Raspail’s “The Camp of the Saints” is proving more prophetic than Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” or Orwell’s “1984.” Considering the crises facing Europe, the question is no longer: Will the EU survive? It is Orban’s question: Will European civilization survive the century? This year, the EU monetary union, the eurozone, avoided breaking apart because Athens capitulated and accepted austerity, and the hard-bargaining Germans agreed to a bailout. Under the Schengen Agreement, there are to be no barriers to trade and travel, to the movement of goods and people inside the EU. Yet, across Europe, fences are going up, borders are
being re-established, antiimmigrant and anti-EU parties like the National Front of France’s Marine Le Pen, are gaining converts. If the mass migrations are not halted, the rise of nationalist regimes at the expense of Europe’s liberals and leftists is inevitable. With birth rates in this smallest and least populated of continents below replacement levels for decades, Europe is aging, shrinking and dying, as it is being invaded and altered forever. Optimists point to how America absorbed the 15 million that arrived in the Great Wave of immigration from 1890 to 1920. But they ignore the differences. America’s immigrants were Europeans from Christian nations coming to a country with a history of assimilation. And the Great Wave stopped in 1924, for 40 years. Unlike America, Europe has never known mass immigration. And those pouring into Europe are Arab, African and Muslim, not European Christians or Jews. They come from other civilizations and cultures. And they are not all assimilating but rather creating enclaves in Europe that replicate the lands whence they came. Last year, the Swiss voted to cut back on immigration. This year, with the UK Independence Party growing in popularity, Prime Min-
ister David Cameron is demanding reforms in the EU charter, before the British vote on whether to leave the EU altogether. With migrants in the thousands milling around Calais and the entrance to the tunnel to Dover, Brits must be wondering whether it was wise to dig that tunnel beneath the Channel to their island home. The threats raised by the mass migration into Europe rise to the level of the existential. Can a civilization survive the replacement of the people who created it by people of other races, religions, and civilizations? Ask the Native Americans. Will Europe remain Europe if she is repopulated by Arabs, Muslims, Asians and Africans? What will hold Europe together? Free trade? In 1981, when Solidarity was crushed by the Warsaw regime on the orders of Moscow, Americans took up the cry – “Let Poland be Poland.” One day soon, a voice will arise across the Atlantic calling for an end to this invasion, by force if necessary, and declare: “Let Europe be Europe!” (Daily Corinthian columnist Pat Buchanan is an American conservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster.)
Rubio, Cruz look like top contenders in debate Tuesday night’s Fox Business/Wall Street Journal debate in Milwaukee provided clues as to why Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have been climbing, not by wide margins but perceptibly, into the top-polling positions of the candidates behind the two poll leaders, Donald Trump and Ben Carson. The widespread assumption among political insiders is that in the crunch time when things really matter Republican voters will abandon the frontrunners for candidates with experience in public office. That hasn’t happened yet. But if it does, Rubio and Cruz are clearly better positioned than anyone else. With his smiling demeanor, unhesitant phrasing and ease at pivoting from one point to where he wants to go, Rubio has become a star in debate formats. He parried his first question, about reducing benefits, to how his modest-income immigrant family achieved the American dream; how higher minimum wages accelerate automation; his wider economic program; and the need for vocational education (“We need more welders and less philosophers”), all in 333 words. Asked about automation
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he said it took 75 years for the telephone but only one year for Candy Crush to get Michael 100 million Barone users – a signal that he’s Columnist in touch with contemporary tech – and then referenced his plans to reshape higher education, which has been performing especially badly of late. Later Rubio defended the per-child credit in his tax plan, which has been attacked by some conservatives as ineffective for growth, by saying his most important role was as a parent and, in a nod to cultural conservatives, “You can’t have a strong nation without strong values, and no one is born with strong values.” When Rand Paul challenged his plan as nonconservative, Rubio deftly segued to Paul’s weakness, saying that he “is a committed isolationist” and, citing threats from “radical jihadists,” Iran and China, “we can’t even have an economy if we’re not safe.” He returned to foreign policy on his next response to Paul, much later, by calling Vladimir Putin a “gang-
ster” who “understands only geopolitical strength,” hailing Israel’s democracy and arguing that radical Islamists who don’t want girls to go to school are on the march. Near the end of the debate, Rubio interjected on how big government had strengthened – not weakened – the big banks and how the Dodd-Frank law “codified too-big-to-fail.” He was echoing a point made by Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz, but with an especially memorable phrase. “You know what (the big banks) say to people with a wink and a nod? We are so big, we are so important that if we get in trouble, the government has to bail us out.” How would he stand up to the more experienced Hillary Clinton? “This election is about the future, and the Democratic Party and the political left has no idea about the future,” he said. “If I am the nominee, they will be the party of the past and we will be the party of the 21st century.” Rubio’s sunny youthful demeanor and his capacity to discuss policy knowledgeably leads many Republicans to conclude he’d be their strongest candidate against Hillary Clinton. Cruz got to talk more than Rubio or anyone else and spoke effectively as well. He
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was on strong ground in arguing that illegal immigration drives down some wages and that “the rich do great with big government” – a great theme for Republicans next fall. He adopted Walter Bagehot’s 1873 recipe for banks during a panic: large loans at high interest. But he sounded high-risk when he said the money supply “should be tied to a stable level of gold.” The gold standard has not been a winning issue since the 1920s. “I believe that 2016 will be an election like 1980,” Cruz said, “that we will win by following Reagan’s admonition to paint in bold colors, not pale pastels.” But 2016 is not 1980, and sometimes your colors are too bold. Of course other candidates remain in the race, and Trump and Carson, though they didn’t dominate the dialogue, continue to lead in the polls. But it looks like the choice may boil down to Rubio or Cruz. (Daily Corinthian columnist Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.)
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