Read more: What would Trump do?
For weeks, all political eyes had been trained on Wisconsin and its important primary on 5th April. In a presidential season that has gone from marathon to carousel complete with tinny soundtrack, Wisconsin offered gravity, a return to the solid ground of pragmatic “high-information” voters. In the run-up, there was much praise for Wisconsinites’ refreshing “niceness” and “civility—demonstrated even by talk-radio interrogators. In fact the state, for all its wonderland splendours of pine forests and Great Lakes, is also the home of two great rivering strains of American ideology—the first personified by Robert M. La Follette, the pro–labor Progressive who mounted a third-party campaign for president in 1924 and got an impressive five million votes; the second darkly embodied in the cold war demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy with his cry “twenty years of treason” directed at Democrats in the 1950s.
In sum, the ideal venue for the campaign’s two remaining heart-on-sleeve, high-dudgeon ideologues—Bernie Sanders for the Democrats and Ted Cruz for the Republicans. Sanders, heir to “Fighting Bob” La Follette, came into the state hoarsely declaring war on Wall Street “billionaires” and was greeted by rapturous crowds in Madison, the state capital and site of the University of Wisconsin, the superb land-grant institution. Cruz, a technician of McCarthy-style attack on the traitorous “Washington cartel”—by which he means lawmakers in both parties—rummaged for votes in the conservative suburbs of Milwaukee, with its enclaves of evangelicals whose love of God is matched by their fear of Satanic “big government.”
Both men succeeded, inflicting damage on the front-running candidacies now wobbling like struck ten-pins. Despite repeated defeats, Hillary Clinton is far ahead in the delegate count and is almost certain to get her party’s nomination. Still, Sanders has forced her into a prolonged fight on his populist terms. The elder stateswoman of the Obama administration now recites her “progressive” bona fides and has shed the mantle of her husband’s centrist presidency.
For Cruz, victory comes wrapped in bitter irony. He has at last become the sole paladin of the “NeverTrump Movement,” but party elders and wealthy donors detest him; they have simply made the cold calculation that he is best positioned to block Trump from getting the 1,237 delegates he needs if he is to end the contest before the party’s convention in mid-July. Stopping Trump won’t give Cruz the nomination. On the contrary, at an “open” convention brokers could anoint a more palatable alternative, like Wisconsin’s own Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House who lately has affected the pose of a statesman sadly gazing down at the ugly and “divisive” scrum below.
But Cruz has defeated the odds before. He has been antagonizing other Republicans for much of his career and still keeps rising, in part because he is prodigiously intelligent—quite possibly the cleverest candidate in the field, Democrat or Republican. For a profile published in 2014, The New Yorker’s legal writer Jeffrey Toobin read one of Cruz’s student papers at Princeton—it was on the Constitution—and reported “the level of erudition . . . is extraordinary, especially for a twenty-one-year-old who had not yet gone to law school.” Later Cruz did study law, at Harvard, dazzling his professors. He then became perhaps the finest appellate lawyer of his generation, repeatedly arguing and winning cases at the very top level—the Supreme Court.
At the same time, Cruz is attuned to the down-market retail politics of the current moment. A good example is the episode that made him famous (or notorious), the government shutdown he orchestrated in 2013, when he had been in the Senate less than a year. His stated mission was to “defund Obamacare,” which he now promises to revoke the instant he takes office. Every other Republican has said the same thing. But while candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio offered “replacement”policies to protect the 20 million citizens who would lose their insurance, “Ted doesn’t have a health care policy,” says Ramesh Ponnuru, the Bloomberg and National Review columnist, who has known Cruz for many years and calls him a friend. “He has three talking points, but he hasn’t put a plan out. The great argument that’s always made about Republicans, that they fulminate about Obamacare but don’t have a plan, is exemplified by Ted.”
All this infuriates other Republicans. So does Cruz's habit of denouncing senior colleagues. "If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you," Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, has said. Yet Graham is now fund-raising for Cruz. Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, has likened Cruz to Kenneth Widmerpool, the servile opportunist in Anthony Powell’s cycle of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, who climbs ever closer to power, incurring scorn at every stage. One difference is that Cruz possesses genuine wit and cheerfully accepts how little loved he is. In a recent late-night TV appearance, he was teased by his host, the comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who said of Cruz’s late-blooming success with voters turning against Trump, “You kind of held out until they found someone that they liked less than you.” Cruz, grinning through the laughter, replied, “There you go. It is a powerful strategy.”
Now read: How the Republicans could stop Donald Trump
For weeks, all political eyes had been trained on Wisconsin and its important primary on 5th April. In a presidential season that has gone from marathon to carousel complete with tinny soundtrack, Wisconsin offered gravity, a return to the solid ground of pragmatic “high-information” voters. In the run-up, there was much praise for Wisconsinites’ refreshing “niceness” and “civility—demonstrated even by talk-radio interrogators. In fact the state, for all its wonderland splendours of pine forests and Great Lakes, is also the home of two great rivering strains of American ideology—the first personified by Robert M. La Follette, the pro–labor Progressive who mounted a third-party campaign for president in 1924 and got an impressive five million votes; the second darkly embodied in the cold war demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy with his cry “twenty years of treason” directed at Democrats in the 1950s.
In sum, the ideal venue for the campaign’s two remaining heart-on-sleeve, high-dudgeon ideologues—Bernie Sanders for the Democrats and Ted Cruz for the Republicans. Sanders, heir to “Fighting Bob” La Follette, came into the state hoarsely declaring war on Wall Street “billionaires” and was greeted by rapturous crowds in Madison, the state capital and site of the University of Wisconsin, the superb land-grant institution. Cruz, a technician of McCarthy-style attack on the traitorous “Washington cartel”—by which he means lawmakers in both parties—rummaged for votes in the conservative suburbs of Milwaukee, with its enclaves of evangelicals whose love of God is matched by their fear of Satanic “big government.”
Both men succeeded, inflicting damage on the front-running candidacies now wobbling like struck ten-pins. Despite repeated defeats, Hillary Clinton is far ahead in the delegate count and is almost certain to get her party’s nomination. Still, Sanders has forced her into a prolonged fight on his populist terms. The elder stateswoman of the Obama administration now recites her “progressive” bona fides and has shed the mantle of her husband’s centrist presidency.
For Cruz, victory comes wrapped in bitter irony. He has at last become the sole paladin of the “NeverTrump Movement,” but party elders and wealthy donors detest him; they have simply made the cold calculation that he is best positioned to block Trump from getting the 1,237 delegates he needs if he is to end the contest before the party’s convention in mid-July. Stopping Trump won’t give Cruz the nomination. On the contrary, at an “open” convention brokers could anoint a more palatable alternative, like Wisconsin’s own Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House who lately has affected the pose of a statesman sadly gazing down at the ugly and “divisive” scrum below.
But Cruz has defeated the odds before. He has been antagonizing other Republicans for much of his career and still keeps rising, in part because he is prodigiously intelligent—quite possibly the cleverest candidate in the field, Democrat or Republican. For a profile published in 2014, The New Yorker’s legal writer Jeffrey Toobin read one of Cruz’s student papers at Princeton—it was on the Constitution—and reported “the level of erudition . . . is extraordinary, especially for a twenty-one-year-old who had not yet gone to law school.” Later Cruz did study law, at Harvard, dazzling his professors. He then became perhaps the finest appellate lawyer of his generation, repeatedly arguing and winning cases at the very top level—the Supreme Court.
At the same time, Cruz is attuned to the down-market retail politics of the current moment. A good example is the episode that made him famous (or notorious), the government shutdown he orchestrated in 2013, when he had been in the Senate less than a year. His stated mission was to “defund Obamacare,” which he now promises to revoke the instant he takes office. Every other Republican has said the same thing. But while candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio offered “replacement”policies to protect the 20 million citizens who would lose their insurance, “Ted doesn’t have a health care policy,” says Ramesh Ponnuru, the Bloomberg and National Review columnist, who has known Cruz for many years and calls him a friend. “He has three talking points, but he hasn’t put a plan out. The great argument that’s always made about Republicans, that they fulminate about Obamacare but don’t have a plan, is exemplified by Ted.”
All this infuriates other Republicans. So does Cruz's habit of denouncing senior colleagues. "If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you," Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, has said. Yet Graham is now fund-raising for Cruz. Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, has likened Cruz to Kenneth Widmerpool, the servile opportunist in Anthony Powell’s cycle of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, who climbs ever closer to power, incurring scorn at every stage. One difference is that Cruz possesses genuine wit and cheerfully accepts how little loved he is. In a recent late-night TV appearance, he was teased by his host, the comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who said of Cruz’s late-blooming success with voters turning against Trump, “You kind of held out until they found someone that they liked less than you.” Cruz, grinning through the laughter, replied, “There you go. It is a powerful strategy.”
Now read: How the Republicans could stop Donald Trump
