Tred Cruz And Rand Paul Have Very Dedicated Supporters-- But Not Very Many Of Them

Latest rap on Hillary Clinton, the odds on favorite to be the next president of the United States, is that her support, though wide, is shallow. Okay... And this weekend Politico made the case for two Republican would-be contenders, each of whom has very deep support, albeit extremely narrow: Rand Paul and my own bet to be the GOP nominee, Ted Cruz. Let's look at Paul first. His inner circle says he plans to run-- "a 95% certainty," and in a state where the voters don't want him to run for reelection as senator and run for the presidency at the right time-- and, perhaps more important, where the Democrats kept their 54-46 majority in the state House. That means a bill allowing Paul to run for both simultaneously isn't going to pass.

Before we go any further, let's look at the Real Clear Politics average polling support for the nomination among the top 11 candidates. The percentage in parenthesis is the Real Clear Politics average of the match-up with each potential candidate against Hillary.

• Rand Paul- 11.8% (Clinton +8.5%)
• Jeb Bush- 11.6% (Clinton +9.9%)
• Mike Huckabee- 11.3% (Clinton +9.6%)
• Chris Christie- 10.6% (Clinton +9.4%)
• Paul Ryan- 10.0% (Clinton +6.7%)
• Rick Perry- 7.8%
• Marco Rubio- 7.0% (Clinton +11.5%)
• Ted Cruz- 6.6% (Clinton +13.8%)
• Scott Walker- 4.4%
• Rick Santorum- 3.0%
• Bobby Jindal- 2.8%

They didn't poll the 4 vanity candidates against Clinton. The numbers look reasonable for Paul; he's ahead of the other Republicans in the polls and he's doesn't get as badly trounced by Clinton in the one-on-one match-ups as any of the others except Ryan, who has his own problems with running. At a dinner of his presidential team last Wednesday, he "gave optimistic remarks that left little doubt about his intentions. Expect a spurt of hiring after the first of the year. The campaign-to-be combines family loyalists who served Rand’s father, former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), plus new talent, including tech wizards and social-media Svengalis. Look for a Senate-reelection announcement by Paul as soon as next week, after he returns to Kentucky from the Hill. He has lined up endorsements from state Republican leaders, and now will circle back to them. The campaigns will run in tandem. If Paul wins the GOP nomination, he might drop the Senate race." That isn't legal the way the law now stands in Kentucky. And, what the numbers don't show, however, is the lack of potential for growth. He has a very loyal cult following-- deep and narrow. One of his problems among the members of the Republican Party Establishment is similar to his father's problem with the same lot-- libertarianism and an anti-neocon foreign policy disposition more in touch with what many Americans want than what Establishment Republicans want. He's basically "declared war" on the GOP approach to foreign policy.

His moderate non-interventionism is a far cry from his father's absolutist desire for America to exit the world stage. But Paul's stance is light years away from the hyper-hawk neoconservatism that's dominated Republican foreign policy thinking for decades.

Paul is signaling that, when he runs for president in 2016, he isn't going to move toward the Republican foreign policy consensus; he's going to run at it, with a battering ram. If he wins, he could remake the Republican Party as we know it

...Paul outlined four basic principles for conducting foreign policy.

First, "war is necessary when America is attacked or threatened, when vital American interests are attacked and threatened, and when we have exhausted all other measures short of war." But not otherwise.

Second, "Congress, the people's representative, must authorize the decision to intervene." No more war without express authorization.

Third, "peace and security require a commitment to diplomacy and leadership." That means expanding trade ties and diplomatic links around the world.

Fourth, "we are only as strong as our economy." For Paul, the national debt and slow growth are national security crises.

In the abstract, this doesn't tell you a whole lot about what Paul believes. But when he gives specific examples of where he agrees and disagrees with Obama's policy, the core idea becomes clearer: Paul wants to scale down American commitments to foreign wars.

Paul endorses the original decision to invade Afghanistan, but criticizes Obama's decision to escalate it. He savaged the Libya intervention, calling Libya today "a jihadist wonderland." He supports bombing ISIS, but blasted Obama's decision to arm the Syrian rebels: "the weapons are either indiscriminately given to 'less than moderate rebels' or simply taken from moderates by ISIS."

But Paul also, much more quietly, agrees with major parts of the Obama agenda. In a move that's bound to infuriate Republican hardliners, he's calling for negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. He tacitly endorsed Obama's sanction-and-negotiate approach to the Ukraine crisis. And he called for a peaceful, cooperative relationship with China.

In Paul's ideal world, America only very rarely engages in war. Most of its relations with foreign powers are conducted via diplomacy and trade with other states. This is hardly a detailed theory of how to conduct American foreign policy, but it is absolutely a conservative vision for ramping down America's role in the world.

Paul's agenda has a lot more in common with Barack Obama's view of the world than it does with, say, John McCain's. But his speech very cleverly played up the criticisms of Obama, and minimized the points of agreement. That's because the basic goal of the speech was to teach conservatives that they can oppose foreign wars and Democrats at the same time.

The real target of Paul's speech were the neoconservatives: the wing of the GOP that believes that American foreign policy should be about the aggressive use of American force and influence, be it against terrorist groups or Russia. Paul's unsubtle argument is that this view, dominant in the GOP, is a departure from what a conservative foreign policy ought to be.

..."Paul's been clear about his goal," DNC Press Secretary Michael Czin told reporters before the speech. "He wants to see America retreat from our responsibilities around the world." A Paul primary win would force Republicans around the country to line up behind Paul's non-interventionism against these attacks. It might also lead the Democratic Party to become more hawkish as it unites against Paul's philosophies-- and that's particularly true if Hillary Clinton, who is already on the more hawkish side of the Democratic spectrum, is the nominee.

The Democratic Party? Really? They must mean the hack careerists inside the Beltway. Democratic grassroots voters aren't following Hillary down some hawkish rabbit hole so fast. Considerably further right than Paul-- and probably even Hillary-- is the most beloved by the McCarthyite/neo-fascist wing of the GOP, Ted Cruz. This week Erica Greider speculated that the poundage lost and the trips to early primary battlegrounds, South Carolina and Iowa, indicate he's running for the nomination, even if "he’ll have a long road ahead to build the type of national organization and national stature necessary for a presidential run."

But he’ll be in a better position to do so than his critics might think. His insurrectionist ethos in the Senate, especially during his 2013 campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act, made a lasting impression on primary voters around the country; in September, he won the straw poll at the Values Voters Summit, for the second year in a row. Cruz’s support among the base should be enough to give him a hearing in a crowded primary field.

As his team begins to consider the road ahead and other contenders size up what he would be like on the campaign trail, it’s clear that he has serious weaknesses—but his greatest weakness is not his most obvious one.

The most obvious one is that he’s unpopular and divisive. Polls show him as one of the least well-liked prospects in the Republican field, and he trails Hillary Clinton in hypothetical matchups. It’s far too early for the polls to have predictive value, but they do point to the fact that there’s nothing about Cruz that overtly says “big tent” or “broad coalition,” two hallmarks of most successful bids to win more than 270 electoral votes in a nation of 330 million people. Even before he was elected to the Senate in 2012, he had been typed as a Tea Party firebrand, having won the Republican nomination after a ferociously contested primary runoff against Texas’s incumbent lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst. During his first months in the Senate, he did nothing to dispel that impression. And by the end of 2013, his campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act seemingly triggered a government shutdown and nearly led the country to default on its debt. Plenty of people, on both sides, saw him as reckless, a demagogue and a bully, and his favorability ratings reflect that.

As obvious as this problem is, Cruz will probably be able to overcome it. As the hubbub over the shutdown has subsided, so too has the rhetoric over its ringleaders. The record will show that the formal cause of the shutdown was the House, and Cruz, as a senator, has an alibi for that. Meanwhile, having led the defunding campaign, he can reasonably argue that he led the Republican opposition to stop Obamacare. That’s impressive, considering that he wasn’t even in public office when the law was passed, and it’s not a bad campaign credential; if you’re going to demagogue, you might as well demagogue on the only issue that unites and animates the entire Republican coalition, an issue that remains, as the vice-president once put it, “a big f-ing deal.” As for the idea that Cruz is a bully-- well, let’s get the guy on a stage with Chris Christie and see which one flips out first.

Cruz’s greater liability-- and the one that might be hardest to overcome on the trail-- is his inexperience. This is his greatest liability, in fact, because it’s real. He’s about to turn 44, meaning that he’d be one of the youngest presidents ever elected if he won in 2016, and nearly an entire generation younger than, say, a Hillary Clinton or most of the other likely Democratic candidates. He was only elected to the Senate in 2012; he never even ran for office before that, though he served as Texas’s solicitor general under attorney general Greg Abbott. Since arriving in Washington, he has made an outsized impression in his role as a low-ranking member of the Senate’s Republican minority, but his ability to wield power, rather than simply making trouble for those who do, is as yet untested. He has never weathered the unforgiving spotlight of a national campaign, never even really faced the barrage of opposition researchers, negative ads and whisper campaigns that would inevitably come with a presidential bid.

So he's like Obama was, in that one way, when he ran. That's good for a news cycle. If the Establishment is convinced that Hillary's going to win big they might just bite the bullet and let the far right have their turn, preside over an historical loss and go crawl back into their caves for another few cycles. The problem would be the number of senators-- as many as 10-- Cruz could take down with him and the chance the Democrats, if Pelosi shows some vision with her DCCC chair selection this cycle, could win the House back. I'm rootin' for Ted.