Since Ted Cruz announced his presidential candidacy Monday, liberals and their allies in the mainstream media have barely been able to cough out their insult-filled headlines (The Washington Post asked if he was a “smug know-it-all,” while The Atlantic talked about his “paranoid style.” Don’t worry, I won’t link to that pabulum.)
Why is it that Cruz is so hated? Obviously, he’s a conservative and a Christian, so he’s bound to get it just like Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann. But the hatred for Cruz is pathological. Liberals seemingly can’t control themselves when they think of the junior senator from Texas. Any time I’ve mentioned Cruz around one of them, they descend into a gargling mess of name-calling — even more than usual.
I believe it’s more appropriate to put Cruz into a different category, not just with politicians like Santorum and Bachmann, but with the all-around most hated conservatives in left-wing America: Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and the late Andrew Breitbart. Like those media icons did on AM radio, cable TV, and the Internet, Cruz is finding alternative ways to reach people without having to deal with liberal-dominated joints.
The night before he announced his candidacy, he allowed my boy Matt Boyle of Breitbart to hang out and write a feature with his immediate family. Cruz then beat himself to his own announcement by declaring his candidacy on Twitter, where he has 377,000 followers on one account and 421,000 on another.
What liberals hate most in a conservative is independence. And Ted Cruz is independent. He’s self-reliant. He’s outside of their control. Regardless of whether or not he’s built enough of an infrastructure to get the nomination (which remains to be seen), he’s going to try for it by his own path, on his own terms. And his path doesn’t really go through their booby trap-filled lawn.
He doesn’t have to go do BuzzFeed Brews to talk about “comprehensive immigration reform” and “marriage equality” like all the rest of them. He can go on Limbaugh’s show and talk about amnesty and gay marriage. He doesn’t have to sit around handcuffed in the Senate chamber with a bunch of stiff old bureaucrats — he can challenge the rules of order in leading last-minute rescue missions like Tom Brady trailing 24-14 in the second half.
The most powerful kind of politician is one who can create his own, brand new voter coalition. The last despised Republican, George W. Bush, made it happen, telling advisers after the 2004 election that he managed to build a new working-class constituency centered on national-security conservatism. That coalition, ten years later, is gone, but the tea party coalition is stronger than ever and could be Cruz’s for the taking. He knows that the way to attract them is to play a different game, to never allow the liberals to get him by the balls, to remain, as they say in hip-hop, a baller.
It’s a completely justified way for an ideological politician to behave in the Obama age, and it’s liberating. But it shouldn’t just work in politics. It could work for anyone who goes against the grain in their chosen profession, just like us (and we started almost three years before Cruz won a Senate seat).
Why do the mainstream media folks hate The Daily Caller so much? Because we choose not to be subject to their Model UN. They can’t call me to explain myself at their progressive-movement tribunal because I don’t recognize their authority. People actually read our site and that’s what matters. So if media lefties have a problem with me, I can refer them to my middle finger and go back to writing. What can they do? I won’t get to be a reporter for Bloomberg or Politico? Who gives a shit? As Childish Gambino said, “Don’t be mad because I’m doing me better than you doing you.” Or rather, to quote Ice Cube, “Ain’t nothing like a man who can do what he wanna.”
Sure, the media will use its own hatred of Cruz against him when analyzing his chances. Their argument will be, essentially: We hate the guy and we make a conscious choice to portray him negatively, so won’t some of that negative attention turn off independents? (It’s just like when they say, “We choose only to report on gaffes, so let’s go ahead and eliminate all the candidates who might make a lot of gaffes.”)
But when they talk about how divisive he is, how hated he is by the left, just consider where that hate is coming from. Understand it as a sign that Ted Cruz has something else going for him, apart from all the liberal people and institutions that despise him. And he has a different kind of strategy.
Ted Cruz doesn’t just have a bag of tricks. He’s got a full sack.