Ted Cruz is the subject of a very favorable Brian Bolduc cover story in the October 17 issue of National Review. (I’ll link to it when it’s actually online.) It doesn’t get much better than that for a conservative candidate.
Cruz was also endorsed by Citizens United (for whom I used to work back in the day).
Blue Dot Blues says that David Dewhurst’s claims of opposing in-state tuition breaks for illegal aliens is “a really disingenuous position for Dewhurst to take,” since he neither campaigned against the issue, nor did anything about it in all the years he’s been in a position to do so.
Dewhurst’s campaign page says that he met with “grassroots leaders” in Corpus Christi, but doesn’t say who they were or what groups they were associated with. Nor can I find mentions of the meeting via news or blog searches. More details, please.
Dewhurst also had a fundraiser in Abilene. Hmmm: Corpus, Abilene. Dewhurst might be making early swings through the smaller cities of Texas, with an eye toward hitting the bigger ones toward the end of the campaign. That sounds like it could be a pretty sound strategy to me.
I think pretty much all the Republican candidates treated Obama’s “jobs proposal” and the pathetic joke it was, so I’m not going to link to individual instances.
This Saturday there’s going to be a Senate candidate forum in either Garland or Plano; the venue link is at odds with the description under it. I’m seeing multiple descriptions of the venue as “Collin County Community College, Spring Creek Campus Living Legends Conference Center, AA135, 2800 E. Spring Creek Parkway, Plano, TX,” so I would go with that. Update: I’ve confirmed with multiple sources that the Plano address is the correct one.
Here’s a write-up on last week’s Kingwood Area Republican Women candidate’s forum.
And once again, this week, Democratic frontrunner Ricardo Sanchez…did absolutely nothing. Maybe he’s practicing for the title role in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Cruz also got more love in the form of a fundraising push from Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund PAC.
A new poll from the Dem-leaning PPP shows Dewhurst with (no surprise) a big lead in name recognition. The poll also shows Dewhurst, Cruz and Tom Leppert all beating Ricardo Sanchez (who, while theoretically running, has been about as scarce on the campaign trail as Dewhurst) and former Congressman Chet Edwards (who isn’t running, and hasn’t been running).
The most surprising thing from the full poll results? Elizabeth Ames Jones edges out Tom Leppert for third place.
Ross Ramsey calls Dewhurst “the Mitt Romney of the Texas Senate race.” Ouch! “There’s the part of Dewhurst that’s like Romney. Both entered their races as presumptive front-runners. Neither is the sort of guy who’d be at the barbecue at 4 in the morning starting the fire and working on the briskets and ribs. They’re business aristocrats. Swells.” Double ouch!
The Leppert campaign has put up the endorsements of Job Creators for Leppert. Of course, it doesn’t really help defend against the charge of his limited regional appeal when some 90% of the names on the list hail from the greater Dallas area…
And speaking of Garland, there was another longshot Republican there I hadn’t heard of before: Curt Cleaver, who seems to be running on a full-tilt Christian conservative platform. He evidently started running in August. I guess I’ll have to update my cheatsheet of candidate’s web pages. I just sent him email to ask why he’s running, as I do not think the Republican side of the race suffers from a dearth of candidates…
And this week, besides appearing as a question in the PPP poll, Ricardo Sanchez…did absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. It’s been a month since his news page was updated, a month since his Facebook page was updated, and three months since his lone, solitary tweet was released unto the cold, cruel world. Does Sanchez actually want to run for the Senate?
After my interview with Ted Cruz, I was contacted by the Tom Leppert campaign in late August and asked if I wanted to do an interview with Leppert. And they did this despite my very public doubts over several aspects of Leppert’s record. Leppert’s comments on the campaign trail have always been very solidly conservative; my doubts have been over how much Leppert’s actions match his rhetoric. So I agreed to do an interview, after which is was just a matter of finding a date and time when he would be in Austin, which turned out to be Monday, September 19.
From shortly after each of them jumped into the campaign, Cruz and Leppert have been neck and neck in who has the most effective campaign organization, with both seeming very polished and professional. (David Dewhurst’s start was late enough that I haven’t yet collected enough data to make a determination. So far I’m more than little skeptical that the “Ivory Tower” strategy of avoiding the candidate forums is the right choice.) Early on, I sought to get interviews with all of the major Republican Senate candidates, starting in the order they joined the race. I heard absolutely nothing back from the campaigns of Roger Williams, Michael Williams, or Elizabeth Ames Jones, not even the polite “our candidate is really busy but we’ll see if we can work something in” blogger brushoff. By contrast it’s been very easy and hassle free to get information out of the Cruz and Leppert campaigns.
As I mention in the interview itself, this was designed so be a mixture of general and specific questions, as well as mixture of softball and hardball questions.
A few observations:
This was conducted in the atrium of the Renaissance Hotel in the Arboretum, which I thought was the easiest north Austin location to sit down in undisturbed. I think it worked OK, but the acoustics (including some soft background music from hotel sound system) were not necessarily ideal.
Unlike the Cruz interview, which was filmed and edited by their campaign A/V guy, I shot this myself on a Mino Flip camera and did a light edit in iMovie. I think it came out OK, but not spectacularly. Sorry for the tilt and the busy background. Maybe in the long run I need to set up a mini-studio in my guest room for filming interviews and such.
After I finished editing it, I found out that YouTube had imposed a new limit of 15 minutes per video…and removed the button to request lifting the length limit for the videos you post. After I spent an hour uploading it. Thanks a lot, YouTube! That’s why I had to split it into two parts. Plus one part is over 10 minutes, which means you can’t upload it directly from iMovie to YouTube, which is why the aspect ratios of the two may seem slightly different.
I really need to do something about my Jabba the Hutt-like countenance. (I have recently stepped up both diet and exercise efforts, so we shall see.)
Despite my reservations about Leppert, I tried to make this a fair, balanced interview, with some tough questions, but not a piece of “ambush journalism.”
In person, Leppert comes across as a smart, affable politician. He seems more effective in one-on-one retail politics than he’s been at some of the candidate forums. He talks significantly faster than Ted Cruz did.
I had the opposite problem I had with Cruz, when we ran out of time for all the questions I had. Knowing that I only had 25-30 minutes for the interview before Leppert had to go off to his next appointment, I only had 11 questions written down. In fact, he answered the questions fast enough that I got through all my questions and still had several minutes left, so I ended up winging it for the rest of the interview.
Knowing the interview was going to be this short, I couldn’t really follow up on portions of questions, such as those on the Trinity Toll Road Project, and the roles of Lynn Flint Shaw and Willis Johnson.
As Cruz did, Leppert side-stepped some questions, and brought back others to many of his standard talking points. Indeed, “I don’t talk in seven second sound-bites” seems to be Leppert’s favorite seven second sound-bite. As in the Cruz interview, “nothing personnel.” This is what politicians do (indeed have to do) based on the demands made on them by the campaign. Those caveats aside, I think it was pretty successful and interesting interview.
I expect to have more information on Leppert (both positive and negative) in the next week or so.
Cruz has an Op-Ed in the Houston Chronicle calling for a real jobs program of limited government. “Government doesn’t create jobs. The private sector – entrepreneurs risking capital to meet a demonstrated need – creates jobs. But government can kill jobs.”
Tom Leppert had an interview with William Luntz of The Lone Star report.
Leppert was also at a Christian Legal Society luncheon today, but I can’t find a report of it, only photos.
The Texas Tribune says that if Rep. Mike McCaul gets in it could be a game-changer. Maybe. But thus far, The Texas Tribune staff have not impressed me with their deep understanding of inter-Republican Party dynamics.
Elizabeth Ames Jones has an Op-Ed piece up on Real Clear Conservatives.
She also appeared at, um, some sort of dinner for the William Barret Travis Chapter of the Sons of the Republic of Texas. It’s an odd little piece on what sounds like an odd dinner.
Here’s part of a previously mentioned Cruz interview with The Texas Tribune, in which he goes after Dewhurst:
An actual Ricardo Sanchez sighting! (And here you thought he was in a dive bar in Laredo slamming cold ones with David Dewhurst and Fake Ted Cruz.) Granted, it was to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award in Community Service from the National Hispanic Sports Hall of Fame, rather than a campaign appearance. But still…
Addison also participated in a Llano Tea Party meet-and-greet last week. If it seems like Republican longshot Addison is running a harder-working, more serious campaign than Democratic frontrunner Sanchez in every area but fundraising, that’s because he is.
And here’s part two of the Ted Cruz interview. Some interesting thoughts on Victor Carrillo’s loss in 2010, Republican acceptance of Hispanic candidates, and his record studying the Tenth Amendment, among others.
When I did this video interview with Ted Cruz on July 30, I also did an audio interview with him at the same time using an iPhone App called Recorder Pro. The video interview was done by Cruz’s staff (who have a much better camera than I do), and the resulting video was editing done to a sort of “Best of” piece emphasizing his campaign themes. I actually think the full interview will be more interesting to conservatives, as he goes into more detail about a number of topics, including border control, the budget deficit, and federal commerce clause overreach and the 10th Amendment, including a discussion of Wickard vs. Filburn.
It’s taken a good bit longer to get it the audio up here than I wanted to, mainly because I’ve been pretty busy, but also because it was something of a pain to edit the interview and get it up here. First, I had Recorder Pro record in CAF format, which isn’t particularly widely used, so I needed one program to convert it into a .WAV file, and then another to edit the file (there was about a minute and a half of extraneous setup noise I wanted to spare you). Then, after all that, I found out the resulting audio file was too large post all at once, so I’ve split it into two chunks. The first half of the interview is below as an MP3. I’ll try to put up the second half in the next day or so, assuming I don’t get distracted by shiny objects.
I had two separate science fiction conventions to go to (Worldcon in Reno, and Armadillocon here in Austin) back to back, plus some personal upheavals, so it’s taking me some time to get back in the swing of things. So here are some quick Senate race updates for the last two weeks:
Another Senate candidate forum, this time in Waco. Cruz earns points for defense of the Tea Party. Other attendees included Elizabeth Ames Jones, Tom Leppert, and “folksy Magnolia mortician” (to use The Waco Tribune‘s phrase) Glenn Addison. Addison seemed to get off the best line, a shot at Anthony Weiner, when asked if he’d resign if caught in a scandal. “The good lord knows I have my struggles, but I don’t struggle with holding cameras different ways.”
Cruz warmed up the audience before Rick Perry’s announcement at Red State.
Ross Ramsey polls the insiders again. Ramsey also consigns Sean Hubbard and Stanley Garza to the ranks of the invisible men, using the phrase “Ricardo Sanchez, the only declared Democratic candidate.” This is what old school journalists used to call “a factual error.” Do they not teach “Accuracy 101” in The George Soros Academy for Left-Wing Journalism?
Is Rep. Mike McCaul considering getting into the race? I don’t see a lot of running room, but McCaul is frequently ranked as the wealthiest member of congress with a reported fortune for $294 million (his wife, Linda McCaul, is the daughter of the founder of Clear Channel Communications). Given that, his willingness to “spend $4 million to $6 million of his own money” seems pretty penny-ante for a Texas Senate seat, especially with David Dewhurst already in the race. Now, if he were to announce he was spending $25 million of his own money…
There was also evidently a candidate forum put on by Congressman Pete Olsen in Ft. Bend County, but I can’t find any mention of it except on Dewhurst’s site. Also watch Jim Bognet refer to himself as “Manager for Governor David Dewhurst’s senate campaign.” Might want to make sure to slip in that “Lieutenant” before “Governor” next time…
Elizabeth Ames jones endorses Rick Perry for President. I see no indication that Perry has returned the favor for Jones’ Senate race…
And finally, as far as I can, over the last two weeks, Ricardo Sanchez…did absolutely nothing.
Even though I’m on the other side of the political aisle, I thought I would offer you a “protip” for running for the Senate: Most people running a campaign for a high elected office actually, you know, campaign.
Here’s the video edit of my interview with Ted Cruz (click for a larger version on YouTube):
(I think I should have sucked in my gut more.)
After the interview, Cruz said that he reads the blog (which I believe, as I’ve interacted with several members of his campaign who read the blog over the past few months). I said that I started covering the race so closely mainly because the MSM was doing such a poor job of it. He agreed, and said that people wouldn’t start paying attention until the last week. I think he’s right.
Honestly, I have no real issue or ideological concerns with Cruz. If elected, I think he would easily be the best senator Texas has had since Phil Gramm. I do have some small minor concerns with him as a candidate (see this post for some context on the below points). A lot of the things I quibble over is Cruz following standard “How to Campaign 101.” However, I think they may not work as well as in the past for this year, and this particular race.
Frequently Cruz would take the question as asked and segue into one of his talking points, sometimes smoothly, sometimes not. I believe Cruz is right, that the general public is only paying attention to the race in the last week. But this is going to be a long campaign, and I believe Cruz is a bit too “on message” for this stage of the campaign. This part of the campaign, in addition to building a campaign infrastructure and raising money, is to convince Tea Party and Republican Party stalwarts that you’re their guy. Among the Tea Party especially, there’s a certain wariness with politicians being too slick and too programmed. In addition to conservative positions and record (which Cruz has in spades), I think Tea Party patriots are looking for genuine authenticity and sincerity. (“Sincerity – if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” —George Burns). I think that’s a big reason Glenn Addison won the straw poll at the more recent forum. Cruz is a very good off-the-cuff speaker, and I think he needs a bit less scripting and a bit more continuity at this stage of the campaign.
I gave Cruz the opportunity to criticize his rival candidates and he declined, bringing the question around to his Proven Conservative bit. This is also standard practice: Let the candidate take the high road and let proxies and allies handle the attacks. But I’m not sure that wisdom holds anymore, especially in Texas. Rick Perry went negative early, hard and often on Kay Baily Hutchison, and it didn’t hurt his chances at all. I think the Tea Party is looking for a fighter, and don’t think it would hurt Cruz to engage Dewhurst and Leppert on their respective conservative records (or lack thereof) early and often.
Again, keep in mind this is coming from someone who’s observing Cruz more closely than 99.9% of primary voters ever will. I think Cruz is still far and away the candidate that most closely fits William F. Buckley’s definition of who people should vote for, namely “the most conservative viable candidate.”
Thanks again to Ted Cruz (and his campaign) for allowing me the opportunity to interview him.
I have a longer audio version of this interview, covering more topics, I hope to put up later this week
The Cruz campaign emailed to say they’ll be sending me the video file of the interview sometime in the next 24 hours, so here are a few race updates to tide you over until then.
Matt S. Dowling has his interview with Cruz up. I haven’t had a chance to watch all of it yet. Expect the setting to seem eerily familiar when you watch my interview…
And speaking on interviews with Cruz, here’s a snippet he did on a radio interview about the debt limit vote, which he was against.
Yet another high-profile national conservative endorses Cruz, in this case Pennyslvania Senator Pat Toomey. Toomey will always have a place in the hearts of conservative everywhere for pushing the odious Arlen Specter out of the party and taking his Senate seat.
I first encountered Ted Cruz in Laredo in 2003. As the state Senate Democrats’ 46-day Albuquerque quorum break ended, they boarded a plane and went to Laredo to attend a hearing on the matter in Federal court. I accompanied them on the plane, and attended the hearing in the Laredo courtroom. Ted Cruz, then the Solicitor General, was the state’s lawyer in court that day. In other words – ironically – he was Dewhurst’s lawyer in the suit. I have never seen a better courtroom performance, before or since. He was articulate, passionate, and flat-out out-lawyered the Democrats’ legal team. By the end of that hearing, not only was I convinced that Cruz had won the day (which he did), but he was so utterly great that I myself had serious doubts as to the merits of the Democrats’ suit. I’ve been a begrudging admirer of Cruz’ skills ever since.
Polifact says that Tom Leppert calling David Dewhurst a “career politician” is false. Because he’s only been in politics since 1998, not “most of [his] working life.” While I’m not sure I agree with that line of thinking, at least it’s less risible than some of the arguments Polifact has made in the last year…
