Just when you thought that the G.O.P. might finally be wising up, and looking for a way to stop damaging itself in the eyes of voters, up pops Ted Cruz, the Texas firebrand who helped to get this whole shutdown/debt-ceiling thing started. Appearing before an audience of conservative activists in Washington on Friday, Cruz urged his colleagues to hang tough in the budget battle, and declared, “The Democrats are feeling the heat.”
Cruz may be right. It’s quite possible that Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill have spent so much time cheering and high-fiving each other in the past few days that they might need a glass of water to cool down. Just hours before Cruz graced the boards at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, which was hosting something called the Values Voter Summit, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal released a poll showing that the approval rating of congressional Republicans is at twenty-four per cent, its lowest since the pollsters started asking the question. The same poll showed that a majority of voters blamed the G.O.P., rather than President Obama, for the shutdown. Indeed, the President’s approval rating has ticked up a bit since last month—from forty-five per cent to forty-seven per cent.
Now, you may think that twenty-four per cent is a worryingly low approval rating for a Party whose Presidential candidate picked up forty-seven per cent of the vote last year, in an election widely regarded as a rout. Who could go lower than that? Well, Ted Cruz, for one. According the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, the Texan’s personal approval rating is fourteen per cent, which puts him three points below John Boehner. About the only good news in the poll for Cruz was that almost half of the respondents (forty-four per cent) either didn’t recognize his name or weren’t sure what they thought about him. Evidently, his twenty-one-hour monologue on the Senate floor last month didn’t register with many people.
For serious politicians like Boehner and Paul Ryan, who want to preserve the G.O.P.’s rapidly diminishing chances of winning the Senate in next year’s midterms (and the White House in 2016), the message of the polling data couldn’t be clearer: whatever attendees at events like the Values Voter Summit and contributors to conservative Web sites such as Red State may think, it’s time for the G.O.P. to stop committing hari-kari. If reversing course means offering to end the shutdown without securing any meaningful changes to Obamacare, in addition to dropping the immediate threat to force a debt default, most of the G.O.P. leaders are now willing to do it in return for a token gesture from President Obama. And if the president publicly humiliates them, as he did on Friday, by rejecting their initial surrender terms and signaling a determination to torment them for a few more days, well, they’ll grimace and accept that, too.
But Cruz and his supporters won’t. They subsist in a conservative echo chamber where everybody outside “the movement”—from members of the media to K Street lobbyists to opinion pollsters to Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and other members of the Republican leadership—is regarded with suspicion. Later on Friday, when Cruz got back to Capitol Hill after attending the budget talks at the White House, a reporter from NBC News stopped him in the hallway, brought up the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, and asked him if he believed that he had damaged his party. Cruz replied:
I’ll note that that poll was very heavily weighted with an awful lot of Democrats, with an awful lot of Obama supporters, and 20 percent of the people polled were government workers… If you seek out liberal Obama supporters and ask them their views, they’re going to tell you they’re liberal Obama supporters. That’s not reflective of where this country is.
Ah, those dastardly left-wing pollsters who get their checks from radical agitators like Rupert Murdoch and the Comcast Corporation. They’re always trying to put down the Grand Old Party. Why, just last year, they suggested that President Romney was going to lose the election to former President Obama. You can’t believe any of their numbers. Fortunately, there are a few brave patriots, such as Cruz, who are willing to tell it like it is, and put their faith in ordinary Americans—just as long as they’re not those public-sector workers, liberal professors, and other Obama lovers who corrupt the polling data.
“None of us knows what is going to happen on this Obamacare fight right now,” Cruz said in his speech at the Omni Shoreham. “In my view, the House of Representatives needs to keep doing what it’s doing, which is standing strong. That is the model for every other fight. We need no more Washington solutions. We need to go back to the American people.”
To which the response from the White House is equally effusive, if not quite as audible: you go, Ted! And keep it up for as long as you can.
Jackie ----- my luck ran out.
