Now that Sen. Ted Cruz has won the Iowa caucuses — as political giants like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum did before him — he decides to take another swing at New York. He has clearly decided this is working for him, even though Penelope Cruz will be President of the United States before he will.
As always, there are only a few things that Cruz really knows about this city, starting with how tall the buildings are, and with the fact that there is money here that he wants, praise Jesus and pass the Super PAC collection plate.
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So in the aftermath of beating Donald Trump and Marco Rubio on Monday night in Iowa, a place where even Pat Robertson — who once blamed an earthquake in Haiti on a deal he says the country made with the devil during the French Revolution — finished in second place once, here is what Cruz said to Jonathan Karl of ABC News:
“As I travel the country here in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, everyone knows what New York values are. It’s the values of the elite liberals that have done enormous damage to New York and they’re a bunch of cops and firemen and hardworking men and women in the great state of New York who are fed up with the out-of-touch values of Manhattan.”
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You don’t even know where to start with this guy, who finished his successful campaign in Iowa by misleading enough slow thinkers there into thinking that Ben Carson, whose votes he wanted, wasn’t just going home for clean shirts, but going home for good. But when he starts up again about only elite liberals governing New York, not just in the city but in the state, you want to ask him where he thinks Rudy Giuliani was mayor and George Pataki was governor. Perhaps Calgary, the city of Cruz’s birth.
Cruz now gets to spike the ball in Iowa, partly because so much of his own internal polling in the heartland turned out to be spot-on. But what scientific polling has Cruz done here when he talks about the firemen and cops and hard-working people who are fed up with the out-of-touch values of Manhattan?
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It has probably slipped his mind that he didn’t co-sponsor the Zadroga 9/11 Health Act, which provides monitoring and treatment to firemen and cops suffering from World Trade Center illnesses, when he had the chance. Marco Rubio sure did, along with 22 other Republicans in the Senate.
Again: What Cruz mostly knows about Manhattan is that it is where the money is. But as he reaches for the money with one hand, he keeps swinging away with the other — another guy from out of town getting carried along by the roar of the crowd and the cheers of the pep-squad boys of the conservative media — convinced that you can never go broke in politics insulting or attacking New York.
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But then this is completely predictable from a political descendant of Barry Goldwater, who once said that the country would be “better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.” And by the way? If Cruz somehow did get his party’s nomination, he would do about as well in a general election as Goldwater did against Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
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You bet a lot happened in Iowa on Monday night, and not just to Trump and not just because of the strength that Rubio — who you better watch the rest of the way — showed even finishing third. Hillary Clinton, who once led Bernie Sanders in that state by about 3,000 percentage points, ended up winning by .3, helped out in the end because a few coin flips went her way. And you thought it was dumb to have NFL playoff games occasionally decided by a flip of a coin.
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You know who the biggest losers are for now because of the way things played out in Iowa? Pollsters. Even as late as Sunday, the Des Moines Register was telling the whole world that Trump was polling better than Cruz there. Then people actually started casting votes. As they did, they took the last round of polls from places like the Register and Quinnipiac University and folded them into party hats.
There is no question that evangelical voters, whom Cruz has romanced the way he has romanced New York money, pushed him across the finish line, with more votes than any Republican has ever gotten in that state. When it was over Monday night, Cruz had plenty to say.
“Iowa has sent notice that the Republican nominee and the next President of the United States will not be chosen by the media,” he said in his victory speech, “and will not be chosen by the Washington establishment.”
So Ted Cruz doesn’t like Washington, D.C., any better than he likes New York. He is in New England this week, so maybe he looks to take out Manchester, N.H., next. Or Concord. Or maybe even Boston, where you know they would put up their own lousy liberals there against ours anytime.
Let’s see how Cruz does when he gets to New Hampshire, the Granite State. Which means as hard as his head.