Ted Cruz Dumbs Down
Mar 4, 2015 9:34 AM EST
By Francis Wilkinson
In advance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress yesterday, the New York Times reported on a small irritant exacerbating already tense U.S.-Israeli relations. It seems President Barack Obama's former campaign operative, Jeremy Bird, is currently advising a group in Israel that seeks to defeat Netanyahu in national elections later this month.
The story is mostly inconsequential. American political consultants have worked for one side or another in foreign countries for years. Political skills and strategies are surprisingly adaptable to various democratic nations -- or at least that's what many foreign political parties believe. For U.S. consultants, the work is profitable, prestigious and fun. It arguably expands U.S. influence abroad and creates relationships that U.S. leaders can occasionally tap for insight into foreign peers.
Still, the article provided a small, telling window into the character of Senator Ted Cruz. In an interview with the Times, the senator said: “It is deeply troubling that President Obama’s national field director is helping run the campaign to defeat the democratically elected leader of one of our closest friends and allies, the nation of Israel.”
You see what he did there, right? In Cruz's formulation, Bird isn't working for a democratic group trying to influence the outcome of a democratic election in order to advance a particular vision of democratic politics. He’s working "to defeat the democratically elected leader of one of our closest friends and allies." The statement manages to be technically true while implying that a former Obama campaign aide is a treasonous little Bolshevik. (For the record, Republican consultants, too, have worked "to defeat the democratically elected leader of one of our closest friends and allies" in Israel and the United Kingdom.)
Why focus on this evanescent instance of Cruz's standard operating procedure when so many other examples exist? (Cruz's first resort after Netanyahu's speech was to compare Obama with Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler.) Precisely because it matters so little. No matter how insignificant the prompt, Cruz's default is sly insinuation or plain demagogy.
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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-04/ted-cruz-dumbs-himself-down
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