The case for Cruz versus Trump

Burka Blog:

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Trump is a candidate whose entire pitch, such as it is, rests on the illusion that he is a winner. He claims to be a successful businessman; in reality, he would have been better off investing the money he inherited in an index fund forty years ago. He claims to know more about ISIS “than the generals do”; in reality, the little he knows about the armed services is drawn from his experience at a military-themed boarding school. He thinks that he has “better” hair than Marco Rubio; I mean, can a sentient adult offer a straight-faced response to that?

We already know how Trump responds when his braggadocio is exposed for the posturing it is: he lashes out. He’s still brooding about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who committed the cardinal sin of asking him questions during a debate. When Ben Carson challenged his status as frontrunner in the polls, Trump responded by flapping his belt around and comparing Carson to a child molester.

Cruz, meanwhile, is a student of Sun Tzu: “Every battle is won before it is fought. It is won by choosing the terrain on which the battle is fought.” He has won unwinnable arguments before. He has won unwinnable elections before. Cruz does not pick fights he doesn’t think he can win, with the asterisk that sometimes he picks fights with an eye to winning the battle rather than the war. His fight to defund Obamacare, for example, was a fight he picked with an eye to winning the Republican nomination in 2016. And Cruz is now in a position to win the Iowa caucus, which is the kind of fight that he is optimally equipped to win: like Rick Santorum in 2012 and Mike Huckabee in 2008, his support in the polls is an indicator of the passion of the grassroots conservatives, particularly evangelicals, he has carefully cultivated throughout this campaign.

Trump has two choices. He can withdraw from the race for the Republican nomination prior to Iowa’s vote, on February 1st. If so, he sacrifices the prospect of running as an independent candidate. He pledged not to do so back in September, and has recently suggested (entirely predictably) that he might renege on that pledge. Trump’s stated reason for thinking about breaking his own pledge, however, was as follows: “GOP getting ready to treat me unfairly.” That would be a piteous situation. But for the voters of Iowa to select Cruz over Trump would hardly qualify as unfair treatment on the part of the establishment.

Alternatively Trump can take his chances against Cruz. If so he will come to grief, and he will have no one to blame but himself. Though Trump has more than a dozen rivals for the Republican nomination, none have come so close to earning his approval as Cruz has. Trump has even floated the idea of picking Cruz as his running mate. “Well, I like him,” Trump said last week, and that may be the case. Cruz is nonetheless running for the nomination, not to be Trump’s running mate, and Trump has no chance of dissuading the cold, careful Cruz from that goal.

This is another view that Trump will fade.  So far Trump has not succumbed to that prospect although he does appear to have a ceiling on his popularity of around 30 percent in the poll averages.  It appears to me the anti establishment vote is between 50 and 60 percent split among Trump, Cruz and Carson.  Rubio is the only establishment candidate in the top four at this point so while he has some upside, his position on immigration makes it unlikely that he will peel off any of the anti establishment votes.