If you read my post yesterday, you may have followed the link to the video of Ted Cruz’s announcement that he’s running for president. Immediately after, he made the usual rounds and started his speaking tour. He received the endorsement of the most important precincts.
Uhhh, what? What precincts? Those precincts that affect the largest portion of conservative voters—Rush, Hannity, Levin, Beck, a long list of conservative talk-show hosts and The Drudge Report. They are the ones who influence and inform more voters than any politician or pundit.
Cruz Makes Inroads in the Most Important Primary of All
By C. Edmund Wright, March 24, 2015
You can talk about the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire and South Carolina all you want – and those all are important – yet none of them is the most important primary on the Republican side.No, the most critical Republican primary, at least for non-establishment candidates, is the Rush Limbaugh-Drudge Report-Breitbart-Mark Levin-Sean Hannity-Glenn Beck internet message board primary. For a conservative base candidate to win the nomination, he or she must carry most of the above precincts.Now, this is not to say that all or any of the above will endorse a candidate by name during the primary season. They probably will not. But they will all talk about, report on, interview, and discuss what and whom they like. And the some 30-40 million people who make up those combined audiences and readerships will be impacted and educated by these venues. They go to these shows and these websites specifically for opinion and news, after all.Thus, it is critical to win this primary, because those are the voters who turn out for non-establishment candidates in primaries. They just are.Consider: for the past six weeks, Scott Walker has dominated this primary. The Drudge Report has posted many very friendly headlines about Walker during this time, and talk radio – led by Limbaugh – has been recounting over and over how Walker defeated the liberals and the unions in Wisconsin.As a result, he has skyrocketed up the polls, gotten unexpected fundraising traction, and has been drawing fire from panicked liberals from everywhere. And why not? He has beaten them at every turn. It appears he will be formidable for the long run, and as such, he has been aggressively vetted by some on the right as well. The takeaway is, his dominance of the Rush-Drudge-et al. universe was a tremendous launching pad for him. It was almost overnight.…And there was a shift in this realm on Monday as Ted Cruz announced his candidacy at Liberty University. Nobody said anything negative about Walker, but the talk of the internet and talk radio was about how impressive Cruz was, and how the liberal media was going bananas over him, and how finally there was someone articulating what we believe and doing so fearlessly and very well. Rush said it was dazzling and “scared the heck out of the left.”Cruz definitely started to make big inroads in this unofficial primary on this day. (Read the full column here.)
It wasn’t just the left who was attacking Cruz. The GOP establishment was in the forefront of the attackers, NY Representative Peter King was practically frothing at the mouth in vituperative media interview about Cruz.
Mild in comparison, Judge Napolitano took some shots at Cruz as well. Napolitano likes all of Cruz’s domestic positions. Unfortunately, Napolitano has drunk the libertarian kool-aid that ignores national security. Napolitano believes Cruz would lead us into foreign wars. He neglects to consider that such wars may become a necessity due to Obama’s drive to alienate our friends, cozy up to our enemies and emasculate our military. Napolitano is a Ron Paul fan, tine-foil hat and all. That shortsightedness is what is most dangerous of the libertarian platform.
Probably Rush said it best yesterday, “… it’s gonna scare the hell out of the left. They already are. It’s gonna scare the heck out of the Drive-By Media.” Rush is right. Ted Cruz will scare the ‘heck’ out of the left—and the GOP RINOs as well.
A friend told me that Cruz in only in 3rd place in the polls for the GOP 2016 race. I reminded him those were last week’s polls. Let’s see what the polls say when they are updated and released for this week.
