Cruz-in' for a bruisin'

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"...and five more makes ten."

John Cassidy:

For serious politicians like Boehner and Paul Ryan, who want to preserve the G.O.P.’s rapidly diminishing chances of winning the Senate in next year’s midterms (and the White House in 2016), the message of the polling data couldn’t be clearer: whatever attendees at events like the Values Voter Summit and contributors to conservative Web sites such as Red State may think, it’s time for the G.O.P. to stop committing hari-kari. If reversing course means offering to end the shutdown without securing any meaningful changes to Obamacare, in addition to dropping the immediate threat to force a debt default, most of the G.O.P. leaders are now willing to do it in return for a token gesture from President Obama. And if the president publicly humiliates them, as he did on Friday, by rejecting their initial surrender terms and signaling a determination to torment them for a few more days, well, they’ll grimace and accept that, too. 

But Cruz and his supporters won’t. They subsist in a conservative echo chamber where everybody outside “the movement”—from members of the media to K Street lobbyists to opinion pollsters to Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and other members of the Republican leadership—is regarded with suspicion. Later on Friday, when Cruz got back to Capitol Hill after attending the budget talks at the White House, a reporter from NBC News stopped him in the hallway, brought up the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, and asked him if he believed that he had damaged his party. Cruz replied:

I’ll note that that poll was very heavily weighted with an awful lot of Democrats, with an awful lot of Obama supporters, and 20 percent of the people polled were government workers… If you seek out liberal Obama supporters and ask them their views, they’re going to tell you they’re liberal Obama supporters. That’s not reflective of where this country is.

Ah, those dastardly left-wing pollsters who get their checks from radical agitators like Rupert Murdoch and the Comcast Corporation. They’re always trying to put down the Grand Old Party. Why, just last year, they suggested that President Romney was going to lose the election to former President Obama. You can’t believe any of their numbers. Fortunately, there are a few brave patriots, such as Cruz, who are willing to tell it like it is, and put their faith in ordinary Americans—just as long as they’re not those public-sector workers, liberal professors, and other Obama lovers who corrupt the polling data. 

“None of us knows what is going to happen on this Obamacare fight right now,” Cruz said in his speech at the Omni Shoreham. “In my view, the House of Representatives needs to keep doing what it’s doing, which is standing strong. That is the model for every other fight. We need no more Washington solutions. We need to go back to the American people.” 

Meantime, inside the Value Voters bubble: