Politics

Cruz On Inexperience Concerns: I’m No ‘Community Organizer’ [VIDEO]

Alex Griswold Media Reporter
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Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz attacked criticism that he is too inexperienced to be president, saying on CNN’s “State of the Union” that unlike President Barack Obama, he is more than a community organizer. (VIDEO:Rand Paul On Ted Cruz: Conservatives Need To Consider ‘Winability’ Too)

“One of the key things that we’re already hearing is you don’t have a lot of experience when it comes to being in federal office or being in office at all,” noted host Dana Bash. “And that you’re too young and too inexperienced for the job.”

“Dana, I think there are two sharp distinctions between where I am today and where Barack Obama was when he launched his campaign,” he responded. “Number one, in his time in the Senate, he had basically been a backbencher, he had not been leading on issues of any significance. In my time in the Senate you can accuse me of being a lot of things, but a backbencher is not one of them.”

“That may be true,” Bash allowed. “But the big criticism of President Obama, especially as the years went on, he didn’t have any experience in an executive function, he didn’t run any organization, and the same can be said about you.”

“Well, unlike Barack Obama, I was not a community organizer before I was elected to the Senate,” Cruz said. “I spent 5 1/2 years as the Solicitor General of Texas, the chief lawyer for the state of Texas in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

“I supervised and led every appeal for the state of Texas in a 4,000-person agency with over 700 lawyers. Over the course of 5 1/2 years, over and over again Texas led the nation defending conservative principles and winning,” he said.

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