I keep hearing that Ted Cruz's own party despises him, but Brian Beutler is right -- on Cruz's behalf, right-wingers in good standing worked the refs, whined "Liberal media bias!," and got Dylan Byers of Politico to write this:
Ted Cruz, Wendy Davis and media biasUm, Ted Cruz has already spent his entire extremely brief Senate career getting that kind of attention, especially from the right-wing press -- and it hasn't just been from the right-wing press, or just during his mere nine and a half months in office. ("Ted Cruz Speech Stokes 2016 Speculation" was a headline in, um, Politico more than a month before he was sworn in as senator. A year earlier, in 2011 -- well before he'd even won his Senate primary -- Cruz had already made the cover of National Review, where he was deemed "the next great conservative hope.")
... you can forgive conservatives for being upset with the mainstream media's coverage of the Cruz affair. When a Democrat like Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis filibusters against abortion restrictions, she is elevated to hero status, her tennis shoes become totems. When Cruz grandstands against Obamacare, he is a laughingstock in the eyes of many journalists on Twitter, an "embarrassment" in the eyes of The New York Times editorial board.
"Gee I wonder why NYT and WaPo and everyone else gave ecstatic coverage to Wendy Davis but not to Ted Cruz. I just can't make sense of it!" John Podhoretz, the conservative columnist, tweeted on Wednesday morning.
... the coverage of Cruz has been critical, and in some cases unforgiving, from the outset. At least initially, Davis wasn't viewed through a critical lens at all. Her willingness to stand for 11 hours was evidence of the American dream in action. Period.
After Davis's filibuster in June, she got a glowing Vogue profile and was interviewed by nearly every major network and show that deemed her the new superstar from the Lone Star....
But I'm getting away from my main point, which is that however much hate there is for Cruz on the right, that isn't preventing the right from scoring a political point by declaring him a victim on behalf of right-wingers everywhere. Can you imagine something comparable on the left? If, say, Alan Grayson (or, in the past, Cynthia McKinney) embarrassed Democrats with a high-profile procedural stunt that more-established Dems knew from polls would alienate the public, can you imagine those Dems ultimately rallying around the perpetrator of the stunt if it turned out to be exactly as embarrassing as expected?
Speaking of rallying around the perpetrator, I see that Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus is defending Ted Cruz at RedState, where (as I noted in my last post) Erick Erickson is unswervingly pro-Cruz. Here's what Priebus writes:
In a battle between Ted Cruz and Harry Reid, we must stand with Senator Cruz.Republicans may grumble about Cruz, but there's fear as well: if you're in the GOP, you really, really don't want to have too many enemies on the right. There's nothing comparable to this in the Democratic Party -- Democratic officeholders and officials often relish the opportunity to make enemies on the left, and Democratic voters don't flee unless a rebuff attains Lieberman-like levels.
... Senator Ted Cruz refuses to be bullied by Harry Reid and the Democrat-led Senate. Fifty-five percent of Americans disapprove of the manner in which ObamaCare is being implemented, yet Harry Reid and Senate Democrats continue to defend it, even at the expense of keeping the government running.
Republicans run the House and they've done their part: funding the government, defunding ObamaCare. Senator Cruz is continuing the fight in Senate....
