By
Updated Feb. 25, 2016
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:
Donald Trump is properly understood as running an independent candidacy from inside the formal structure of the Republican Party, as Mike Bloomberg did to run for mayor of New York City. Nothing remotely resembling a political party is associated with Mr. Trump. If he loses the nomination or the general election, he will walk away from his Republican supporters by dawn. The GOP will look like a forest shredded by a tornado.
Ted Cruz has to be wondering: What happened?
In the wake of his third-place finish in Nevada, Mr. Cruz’s case for himself is: Don’t forget Iowa. He has come a long way.
In the fall of 2013, the freshman Texas senator rolled the dice so boldly that the biggest congressional Texan of all time, Lyndon Johnson, would have been agog. Sen. Cruz, with the whole Republican Party raging at him, pulled off a shutdown of the U.S. government. He publicized the shutdown with a 21-hour speech on the Senate floor, attacking other Republicans for not joining his Pickett’s charge against ObamaCare, then a federal law.
Ted Cruz knew amid this GOP chaos that he was going to run for president in 2016. He had the game plan in hand.
The plan was to make a household name for himself as the Republican Party’s best-known outsider. A narrative back then held that a deep wave of anger at the party’s leadership was building in the heartland. Ted Cruz was going to personally deepen the anger and then ride it.
It would surface with a victory in Iowa, which he got, build in South Carolina, and then surge through Super Tuesday and especially Texas with an unstoppable number of Cruz delegates fished from this angry Republican sea of outsiders—tea partiers, anti-immigrant voters, pro-Snowden libertarians, evangelicals and anyone foaming mad at
Barack Obama. The mad-as-hell vote.
It was a plausible primary strategy, elegant even in its mathematical inevitability, despite the crushed-glass content.
Sen. Cruz, the self-designed outsider, is getting killed by the outsider from hell.