Thursday
Conservative columnist Bret Stevens, who regularly engages in a New York Times dialogue with liberal columnist Gail Collins, offered up a choice observation about Texas Senator Ted Cruz following the latter’s Cancun vacation trip during the Texas freeze. I’m still trying to untangle it:
Gail, first of all, my heartfelt sympathies and condolences to all of our friends suffering in Texas, and not just because Ted Cruz is one of their senators.
Also, isn’t the whole Cancún Caper such a perfect encapsulation of Cruz’s character? He’s what happens when All the King’s Men meets National Lampoon’s Vacation. He’s Shakespeare’s Richard III as interpreted by Mr. Bean. He is to American statesmanship what Fifty Shades of Grey was to English prose writing, minus the, um, stimulus.
Cruz, trying to imitate Donald Trump, would like to be Willie Stark, the man-of-the-people-turned-autocrat in the Robert Penn Warren classic. Booking a week at the Cancún Ritz-Carton while your constituents suffer through a catastrophic deep freeze, however, sounds more like the opening premise of a catastrophic Chevy Chase road trip. Incidentally, both movie and Cruz feature dog incidents. Cruz left his dog Snowflake behind in their Texas apartment while, in an instance of black humor, the character played by Chase forgets he has tied a dog (a particularly mean dog, foisted on him– along with a senile aunt–by unscrupulous relatives) to the car’s fender. Unlike Snowflake, the dog in the movie doesn’t make it.
Cruz may fancy himself a shrew political manipulator a la Richard III, but a number of people have pointed out that, had he been Trump, he would have brazened out his Cancun vacation. Instead, like an inept Mr. Bean, he first tried to apologize—in the process of which he blamed the trip on his daughters—and then got the news media to show him loading bottled water into someone’s car. To call this a cheap publicity stunt is to give cheap publicity stunts a bad name.
As far as Fifty Shades of Grey goes, it’s true that Cruz has a sadistic streak, so maybe that’s why that particular novel comes to mind. Stevens’s point, however, is that Cruz is as far from a statesman as E. L. James is from a readable author. James, however, at least titillates us whereas Cruz just makes us cringe.
The best line I’ve heard about the Texas senator comes from another conservative, Matthew Dowd. Why do people take an instant dislike to Ted Cruz? Answer: It saves time.
Further thought: Just to give you a taste of a genuine populist, here’s Willie Stark delivering the speech where he turns on the establishment. Stark, who has been drafted to (unbeknownst to him) split what he will call “the hick vote,” withdraws to throw his support behind the other “hick candidate.” If Cruz ever attempted a speech like this, he’d come across as an even bigger fraud that he already is:
“I have a speech here,” he said. “It is a speech about what this state needs. But there’s no use telling you what this state needs. You are the state. You know what you need. Look at your pants. Have they got holes in the knee? Listen to your belly. Did it ever rumble for emptiness? Look at your crop. Did it ever rot in the field because the road was so bad you couldn’t get it to market? Look at your kids. Are they growing up ignorant as you and dirt because there isn’t any school for them?”
Willie paused, and blinked around at the crowd. “No,” he said, “I’m not going to read you any speech. You know what you need better’n I could tell you. But I’m going to tell you a story.”
Willie goes on to explain how he has been duped and then, after he has (accidentally) pushed the establishment representative into the orchestra pit, concludes with his new announcement:
“Let the hog lie, and listen to me, you hicks. Yeah, you’re hicks, too, and they’ve fooled you, too, a thousand times, just like they fooled me. For that’s what they think we’re for. To fool. Well, this time I’m going to fool somebody. I’m getting out of this race.”