Ted Cruz reaches out to the 47 %

Daily Beast:

Addressing a roomful of well-heeled New York Republican donors Wednesday night, Texas Sen. Ted Cruzurged his fellow GOPers to become less the Party of Romney and the Rich and focus their rhetoric more on providing the poor with a pathway up the economic ladder.

“I am going to suggest that the last election can be explained in two words: 47 percent,” Cruz said, referencing Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded remarksto an earlier group of Republican donors in which he suggested that nearly half of Americans were on some kind of government dole and so unlikely to support him.

“The national narrative of the last election was the 47 percent of Americans who are not currently paying income taxes, who are in some ways dependent on government, we don’t have to worry about them,” Cruz said. “That was what was communicated in the last election. I have to tell you as a conservative I cannot think of an idea more opposite to what I believe. I think Republicans are and should be the party of the 47 percent.”

Cruz, a Tea Party favorite who seemed to come out of nowhere in 2012 to win his election against a candidate backed by the Republican establishment, decried Republicans who fumble questions about how to help the downtrodden: “I have to tell you, every time I see that I want to put my boot through the television set.”

In his 35-minute address, Cruz pushed familiar Republican policy prescriptions but couched them in the concerns of Mother Teresa. Abolishing the IRS would permit more productivity, as people would waste less time and money filling out tax forms. “Rockefellers,” he said, could live with Obamacare, but it would mean fewer jobs for those on the bottom of the income ladder. Dodd-Frank, which reformed Wall Street banks in the wake of the 2007 crash, was “a bill where you don’t have to read any further than the title to know that nothing good can come out of it,” he said.

Returning to the last presidential election, Cruz chided the Romney campaign for harping on President Obama’s remark that small business owners “didn’t build” their business. The Romney campaign began trotting out the slogan “you built that.”

“It was addressed to the people who already owned their business. How much better would it have been if he had said, ‘You can build it,’” Cruz said.
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Ted Cruz's message is one that keeps surprising his critics who want to put him outside the mainstream.  He is much more nuanced in his approach than they are willing to concede so far and that will lead them to underestimate his appeal.

Cruz was also right to reject the pork laden Sandy relief bill and Peter King and other New York politicians who embraced the pork along with the relief made a mistake by refusing to attend this speech.

You can see a piece of the speech here.