New York Times (Opinion)
By Emma Rolley
December 15, 2015
The
most interesting fight brewing in the Republican primary isn’t between
Donald J. Trump and the rest of the world, but between Ted Cruz and
Marco Rubio, wunderkind
vs. wunderkind. One is ruthless in his appeals to the Republican base,
poised to ride its anger to victory, as Tea Party candidates did before
him; the other is attractive to the establishment wing of the party,
with the potential to draw in moderate voters,
but who is sputtering in early primary states.
The
dynamic we’re seeing, between Senator Cruz of Texas and Rubio of
Florida, may ultimately decide which path the Republican Party chooses
to go down in 2016. And, as
hard as it may be to envision where Trumpmania is going to leave us,
Mr. Cruz has jumped to the lead in a new Iowa poll, and has climbed to
second place in a national poll ahead of Tuesday’s debate.
The
two senators have a few basic things in common: They were born within
six months of each other. They are both sons of Cuban immigrants. They
both experienced a meteoric
rise to national politics thanks, in part, to the Tea Party wave that
crashed down on Washington in 2010, when Mr. Rubio was elected, and
continued to support Mr. Cruz’s rise in 2012.
But
over the past two months, they have tried to put as much space between
their positions as possible — and engaged in some innovative
name-calling, comparing each other
to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and even Senator Chuck Schumer. (It’s
not clear whether that particular insult, invoking the New York
Democrat, resonates with the voters Mr. Cruz and Mr. Rubio are courting,
but it has been thrown around by both campaigns.
When asked about his Republican primary cameo, Mr. Schumer simply said:
“I’m honored.”)
Recently,
the two senators have started to distance themselves from each other on
several key issues, especially national security and immigration.
Kellyanne Conway, who
leads Keep the Promise I, one of the super PACs supporting Mr. Cruz’s
candidacy, happily took aim at Mr. Rubio’s record on immigration in an
interview on the tensions between the two candidates. “Can you trust the
person who essentially dropped his bags off
in his new Senate office, crossed the hallway, and started doing deals
with Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, or can you trust the guy who hasn’t
betrayed you?” she said. Mr. Rubio has leveled a similar attack against
Mr. Cruz on national security, saying that
the Texas senator was “part of that coalition that worked with the
Democrats like Chuck Schumer and the A.C.L.U. to harm our intelligence
programs.”
In
a speech to the Heritage Foundation last week, Mr. Cruz outlined a
foreign policy plan that both recognizes the Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria as an existential threat,
but ignores the “occasional dime-store dictator” who does not pose a
threat to national security.
With
typical doomsday aplomb, Mr. Cruz said the United States was facing a
moment “like Munich in 1938” and that the Arab Spring brought a “tsunami
of chaos and unrest.”
He
also criticized fellow Republicans who supported bulk data collection
via the National Security Administration, thereby implicating fellow
candidates Mr. Rubio and
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. “More data from millions of
law-abiding citizens is not always better data,” he said.
Joe
Pounder, an adviser to Mr. Rubio’s campaign, quickly responded to the
implied diss on Twitter. “Odd that in defense of his NSA position,
@tedcruz bear hugs Obama’s
top intelligence official,” he tweeted. “Obama-Cruz agree on NSA.”
You
can expect this kind of sniping to extend into Tuesday night’s debate,
with Mr. Cruz trying to paint Mr. Rubio as a pushover on immigration,
while Mr. Rubio tries
to paint Mr. Cruz as soft on national security.
On
a recent installment of “Morning Joe,” the host, Joe Scarborough, asked
Mr. Cruz if he thought Mr. Rubio was a “big-government Republican?”
“He
wants as much power in Washington as possible, and he has agreed with
John McCain and Lindsey Graham — and for that matter, Hillary Clinton
and Barack Obama — that
we should keep sticking our nose in foreign entanglements where the
result of their policies has made America less safe,” Mr. Cruz replied.
While
Mr. Rubio has not gone as far as his fellow senator Lindsey Graham in
calling for 20,000 American troops on the ground in Iraq and Syria, he
has outlined a hawkish
strategy in the region. In a recent Politico column, Mr. Rubio detailed
a plan to bar Syrian refugees from entering the country, end budget
cuts to the Department of Defense, build a “multinational coalition of
countries” to defeat the Islamic State, and restore
the “intelligence-gathering authorities” of the National Security
Agency that the U.S.A. Freedom Act limited. He also went a step past Mr.
Cruz by arguing that intervening in the Syrian civil war was necessary
to the war on terror in the region.
“Cutting
off oxygen to ISIL also requires defeating Assad in Syria,” he wrote,
referring to an acronym for the Islamic State and the president of
Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
“Some of my Republican colleagues are also vying for the presidency,
yet they have spent the last several years helping to gut our defense
and eliminate key intelligence programs.”
Mr.
Cruz has derided Mr. Rubio’s platform as “military adventurism,” and
his allies have linked Mr. Rubio, negatively, to the Bush doctrine of
foreign policy. The Texas
senator also spent the last Republican debate leveling attacks against
Mr. Rubio for the Florida senator’s support for the 2013 Gang of Eight
immigration reform bill.
Mr.
Rubio and his allies have sought to counter those blows by arguing that
Mr. Cruz supported a pathway to legal status for undocumented
immigrants with an amendment
he introduced in 2013. But, with all due respect to the Rubio campaign,
this is a bit of a stretch: Mr. Cruz deliberately introduced the
amendment to foil the Gang of Eight bill, and Republican voters are
unlikely to view Mr. Cruz as pro-amnesty anytime soon.
“That
was a poison pill to both Rubio and the Democrats, and it exposed the
bill for what it was, which was amnesty and a pathway to citizenship,”
Rick Tyler, a spokesman
for the Cruz campaign, said in an interview. “It’s an incredibly weak
argument, but they seem to be persisting with it.”
Mr.
Rubio is unlikely to win the immigration debate among conservatives,
though: Mr. Cruz’s campaign has spent the past four months diligently
suctioning itself to the
xenophobic Mr. Trump and his legion of supporters. Mr. Cruz has refused
to repudiate Mr. Trump in public for calling for a ban on Muslims
entering this country — something that Mr. Rubio, Mitt Romney, former
Vice President Dick Cheney, Speaker of the House
Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, Mr. Graham, Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, Governor
Christie and the G.O.P. state party chairmen in Iowa, New Hampshire and
South Carolina have all done.
Of Mr. Trump, Mr. Cruz has said, “I do not believe the world needs my voice added to that chorus of critics.”
Rick
Wilson, a prominent Republican strategist, has written that Mr. Cruz
“appears to be playing the role of political pilot fish to Trump’s Great
White.” It’s a strategy
that has paid off for him so far: In Iowa, for now, the pilot fish has
overtaken Jaws.
In
the third fund-raising quarter, the Cruz campaign raised more than
twice as much cash as the Rubio campaign and enjoys the support of at
least four separate super PACs.
There
are plenty of Rubio surrogates, in addition to the candidate himself,
who are willing to call out Mr. Cruz on what they see as his failure on
national security policy.
In June, Mr. Cruz was one of 23 Republican senators to vote for the
U.S.A. Freedom Act, which placed restrictions on the National Security
Agency’s bulk collection of metadata from phones.
In
November, a nonprofit group called American Encore spent $200,000 on an
ad buy in Iowa saying the bill Mr. Cruz supported was “crafted to
hobble the gathering of intelligence.”
When
asked about the ad, Mr. Cruz shot back, “Senator Rubio’s campaign has
been desperate to change the topic from his longtime partnership with
and collaboration with
President Obama and Chuck Schumer in pushing a massive amnesty bill.”
Sean
Noble, the president of American Encore, supports Mr. Rubio for
president, though he says his group has not endorsed a presidential
candidate yet. He faulted Mr.
Cruz for promoting what he sees as a false notion of privacy over
national security.
“The
Cruz campaign and their allies are trying to change the subject because
he sided with liberal Democrats,” Mr. Noble said. “There is no privacy.
Anyone on Facebook
understands that everything is an open book, so why would we try to
hobble intelligence against those who try to do us harm?”
Funny
he should mention Facebook. The Guardian recently reported that Mr.
Cruz’s campaign hired a firm that scours American Facebook users’ data
to create “psychographic
profiles” and help campaigns target potential supporters online. The
company, Cambridge Analytica, has come under scrutiny for accessing
Facebook data without users’ permission in some cases. It seems a
surprising lack of concern on privacy for a candidate
like Mr. Cruz.
The
powers that be in the Republican Party will ultimately guide their
party to a nominee, and many hope they will do everything in their power
to make sure that person
is not named Trump. The choice the party makes — between the
ideologically pure conservative who does what he needs to do to win and
the candidate who seems to empathize with the new voters the party needs
to attract to avoid becoming obsolete — could clinch
its fate for years to come.
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