Columnist.
With Ted Cruz having dropped out of the 2016 presidential race, there will be a string of eulogies seeking to autopsy his campaign. At least some of those critiques may hit the mark. In particular, Cruz’s campaign strategy went awry in three ways.
After the Michigan primary, there has been a predictable round of handwringing from the GOP about why Donald Trump keeps winning despite being neither a Republican nor a conservative. A lot of answers have been bandied about: there are too many candidates in the race; the media is too nice to him; Republican voters are stupid; it can’t continue forever. The problem is that these answers miss the point. Trump is not the problem. He is also not the cure. He’s the symptom. The Republican Party is sick, and has been for a long time. For a generation Republican voters have consistently pulled the lever for whatever Republican has been trotted out; they are only now realizing they don’t have a lot to show for it.
Like many Americans, I learned my first real civics lesson watching my mother vote. Unlike many, my first lesson was fairly depressing. I grew up in southern Louisiana, and in the 1991 gubernatorial election David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was running against Edwin Edwards, a three-time former governor who had been charged with bribery and was later convicted of 17 counts relating to extortion and racketeering. Edwards was heavily disliked because of his alleged crimes and because he raised taxes sharply as state revenue fell when the oil industry collapsed. Despite this, many in Louisiana were terrified of what might happen if Duke won the election, and signs and bumper stickers sprang up all over the state with one simple message: “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.” On Election Day I watched as my mother dutifully went to the polls, voted for every other office, and then tried to vote for governor. She could not. She couldn’t vote for Duke of course. But she also could not overcome her distaste of Edwards.
I had the great privilege to hear Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia speak on three separate occasions and once to meet him in person after hearing him announce a decision. You can learn a lot about someone by reading his or her work, but some things have to be seen to be fully understood. Scalia was known for his public role as an associate justice and a staunch originalist. But he should be appreciated for much more than that — as a man with a genuinely wonderful sense of humor, as a man who loved his family, and who loved God. However, most of us only really know Scalia through his public work on the Supreme Court, and his insightful, sometimes biting opinions.
