Although Ted Cruz didn’t get much time during the CNN grudge match debate, his campaign has announced that he pulled in over $1 million in the 48 hours following the debate.
Politico reports that Cruz is in a good place:
While other campaigns have been flummoxed and discombobulated by the rise of Trump, Cruz hasn’t. He has a simple political True North — go where the base is. Once it became obvious Trump was catching on with the grass roots, Cruz’s play was obvious: Start acting as if Ronald Reagan’s only failure was not to have handed down a 12th Commandment — thou shalt not criticize Donald Trump.Cruz can be very patient waiting for the mogul to come down to earth. The Texas senator has an ideological and geographical base that means he can play the long game. Consider Iowa. Cruz is sitting in third place there, a comfortable place to be in the late-breaking state. He has captured the intense loyalty of a portion of the grass roots (evident in his consistently crowd-pleasing speeches) and lines up for the caucuses better than Trump does. Cruz is a preacher’s son who announced his campaign at Liberty University. He speaks forcefully on the social issues and is a down-the-line conservative, without a hint of a heterodoxy.
Friday, Cruz appeared on Hannity to discuss the long game his campaign is playing and the frustrating tendency of establishment GOP to cave into Obama on everything from ObamaCare and executive amnesty to Planned Parenthood funding and the Iran deal.
Hannity asks him how he can break through from his current fourth place position to first. Cruz points out that he differs from the other candidates in that he has never supported amnesty (he said this during the debate, too), and he notes that he’s been the often lone voice of conservative pushback in Congress against Obama’s disastrous policies.
Watch:
I like his point about the difference between “campaign conservatives” and Obama being that Obama, at least, sticks to his principles in many areas. The sad thing is the GOP establishment sticks to Obama’s principles, too.
While Trump skipped the Heritage Action event in South Carolina, Cruz showed up and gave some great answers to a range of questions.
Watch:
While Cruz has previously listed five things that he will do his first day in office, he has boiled his candidacy down to a very simple formula for Twitter: “we’ll kill terrorists, we’ll repeal ObamaCare, and we’ll defend the Constitution, every single word.”
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY