Wipeout?
Don’t worry, he’s careful to blame Democrats’ obstruction of a stimulus deal for any blue tsunami that may arise. You-know-who remains faultless. The wrinkle in Cruz’s logic is that, deal or no deal, Americans strongly believe that they’re better off now than they were four years ago. It’s mind-bending that an incumbent in a political climate like that would be staring at a landslide defeat rather than a landslide victory. Which means, if the GOP is wiped out, it’ll be perfectly clear why. And it has nothing to do with a stimulus. The irony of this comment is that Cruz, as much as anyone, has been an impediment to the sort of big-ticket stimulus agreement that might have helped Trump meaningfully in the polls. Watch, then read on. « If on election day people are angry, and they’ve given up hope and are depressed which is what Pelosi and Schumer want them to be I think it could be a terrible election, » says @SenTedCruz. « It could be a bloodbath of Watergate proportions. » pic.twitter.com/swhGzdDrb4 Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) October 9,2020 Let me take you back to WaPo’s story from July 22 on stimulus deliberations within the Senate Republican caucus. Yes, they really have been chewing on this issue for that long on Capitol Hill. Longer, actually. Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) warned GOP colleagues and White House emissaries during a private lunch on Tuesday that conservative voters could revolt in November if Republicans spend too much on the next phase of coronavirus relief efforts. After voting for $3 trillion in new spending and revenue reductions to combat the contagion and its economic consequences, some lawmakers are saying they cannot support a new package if its price tag exceeds $1 trillion. Cruz asked Senate Republicans, “What in the hell are we doing?” Meanwhile, Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) suggested at the lunch that the GOP needs to be willing to keep racking up debt to maintain power. He argued that the full conference needs to focus on protecting their most vulnerable members. Cotton postulated that Democrats would spend more money if they win the Senate majority in November and, therefore, it is cheaper in the long run to allow the size of the spending package to grow with more goodies to benefit incumbents who are up for reelection. The idea that Republican voters would stay home because Trump’s government is spending too much — during a national emergency, no less — is so ludicrous that I can almost hear the laughter in the conference room from his colleagues when he said it. The GOP base doesn’t give a wet fart how much the government spends. The tea-party movement ended long ago, with fiscal responsibility replaced by culture war as the GOP’s ideological north star. Trump was running trillion-dollar deficits even before coronavirus arrived and no one said a word. To the extent that righty voters still care about shrinking government, they would easily convince themselves to overlook a blockbuster stimulus endorsed by the president using the same logic Cotton used, namely, that a reelected Trump would spend less in a second term than Biden would.
