Trump 2016: This Is Why Ted Cruz Should Just Quit
Ted Cruz Has No Chance Against Donald Trump
Rather than simply bowing out gracefully in the face of overwhelming evidence nobody likes him, Texas Senator Ted Cruz will continue to run in the Republican primary for the White House. However, Cruz appears to have decided to offer up some Texas-sized laughter, pulling out his Joker card. Ted Cruz has resurrected the political career of none other than Carly Fiorina, asking her to be his running mate on the Cruz for President 2016 ticket.
The move has little political value, given that Cruz is all but defeated. He is only surviving mathematically. He needed to pull a charismatic move to raise enthusiasm among his supporters, so he picked Carly Fiorina. The logic may have been to exploit her Silicon Valley credentials, which can be seen as a signal of discontinuity—for a candidate that over the months has become more and more the benchmark for the Party bigwigs—to win over the vote of younger conservatives.
It’s more likely, however, that Cruz picked Fiorina because she is a woman. He could have picked Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina (who claims Indian American descent) or Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico.
He’s relying on those voters dismayed by Trump’s misogyny to walk over to his camp. The misogyny, calculates Cruz, will grow even bigger as the Republican primary wanes and leading candidate Trump takes the fight to Hillary. In fact, Cruz has just doubled up on the looser quotient.
Cruz, who clerked for Judge William Rehnquist, wants voters to know he has some recipes to cook bacon using a machine gun. Cruz reminds me of Elmer Fudd, totally lacking in the cartoon character’s charm. He’s certainly not going to get Bugs Bunny’s vote.
As for Fiorina, her much-touted business acumen and distaste for bureaucracy has a big name: Hewlett Packard. Fiorina led HP from 1999 to 2005. Of her tenure, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale University said she was one of the worst CEOs ever because she “destroyed half the wealth of her investors and yet still earned almost $100.0 million in total payments for this destructive reign of terror.” (Source: “Ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina is planning to run for president based on her business experience. Here’s why that’s a terrible idea,” Business Insider, March 30, 2015.)
Carly Fiorina seemed to rise somewhat, and briefly, last September. She performed well during some of the first televised debates, where she managed to gain some national notoriety. Yet, she failed to use that as a base to climb higher. Even if she, like Trump, is not a professional politician—though she did run against Sen. Barbara Boxer in California and lost—the reputation from her years as CEO of HP precede her, and they don’t help.
Cruz has made alliances with other Republican nomination candidates, namely John Kasich, to stop the Trump momentum. The calculation is that by joining forces, Kasich and Cruz would serve as the lightning rod to absorb all anti-Trump votes. The plan was for Kasich to avoid the Indiana primary, allowing Cruz to get his votes as well. Cruz would do the same for Kasich in Oregon and New Mexico. (Source: “The unprecedented deal between Cruz and Kasich to stop Trump is collapsing,” Business Insider, April 29, 2016.) Cruz and Kasich thus hoped to prevent GOP frontrunner Trump from winning the remaining 1,237 delegates to lock in the Republican nomination before the July convention.
That deal is already failing before reaching the execution stage. (Source: Ibid.) This leaves Cruz with Carly Fiorina as his “trump” card.
The actual Donald Trump is amused and maybe more than a little baffled. For one, thing, even the unabashedly self-confident and arrogant Donald Trump has not chosen a running mate yet. Normally, candidates don’t announce such things until they have the nomination in the bag.
