gracchusdixit

Just when you thought the competition for the Republican Party’s Presidential nomination had reached—or breached—the outermost limits of craziness, it got crazier still, careening over the edge of any last shred of sanity into an abyss of self-deceptive self-destruction.  Several days ago, after the quick death of a brief and perhaps phony “alliance” with John Kasich, Ted Cruz announced that his Vice President, in the increasingly unlikely event that he himself might succeed in becoming our President, would be none other than Carly Fiorina.

If not altogether unprecedented, this gambit was, to say the very least, unusual.  Presidential candidates do not customarily anoint their Vice Presidential candidates until they are themselves nominated by their parties.  For Cruz to baptize Fiorina three months before Republicans convene in Cleveland to make up their minds about Cruz himself is either a brilliant act of bravado or utter folly.  Between the two interpretations, folly seems the more plausible.

It must be said that Cruz can’t be blamed for trying, however improbably, to save his stumbling campaign from collapsing altogether.  He was steamrolled by Donald Trump in five states just days before this announcement, leaving him with few options or face-saving excuses.  He needed something, anything, to divert attention from the depressing reality that he no longer has any plausible chance of becoming the Presidential nominee of his party.  Nonetheless, the sheer absurdity of this desperate last-ditch maneuver is jaw-dropping.

Everyone says that Ted Cruz is a smart and canny man.  He is, after all, a product of Princeton and the Harvard Law School, a champion debater, a Supreme Court clerk, a frequent and persuasive litigator in front of that court, a contumacious but remarkably successful thorn in the side of the Republican establishment.  Yet, here he is, this supposedly shrewd politician, announcing what can only be described as one of the dumbest political decisions of all times.

By hitching himself to Carly Fiorina, it is all but certain that Ted Cruz has doomed his prospects for winning either the Republican nomination or the general election.

In the first place, Carly Fiorina is a toxic candidate when it comes to matters of substance.

It was Fiorina who cravenly claimed that Planned Parenthood is in the business of “harvesting baby parts,” insisting against all evidence to the contrary that a fabricated video cooked up to support that slander was real.  To this day, she has neither recanted nor repented of her role in perpetuating that fraud.

It was Fiorina who proclaimed, “There is no Constitutional role for the federal government in setting up retirement plans,” a view that, if acted upon, would end Social Security, condemning more than 15 million elderly Americans to poverty.   She has never bothered to justify this assertion, because she can’t.   If the role of the federal government were limited to things that are explicitly stated in the Constitution, we would have no airports, highways, dams, or bridges.

It was Fiorina who said, “We have 470,000 (small businesses) going out of business every year.  And why?  They cite Obamacare.”  She did not mention that the statistic regarding small business failures is not only routine—most small businesses fail and fail quickly—but came from 2011, years before the provisions of the Affordable Care Act had any effect on businesses large or small.  Nor has she ever acknowledged that not a lick of evidence exists to suggest that the ACA has had any deleterious effects on employers, jobs, or business in general.

Beyond such toxic opinions, Fiorina, in purely political terms, contributes precisely zero to Cruz’s dwindling hopes for winning the Republican Presidential nomination.   She has no track record of electoral success; indeed, she has never held public office.  Which means that she has no political constituency, allies, or allegiances to call upon.

Before she dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination last February, Fiorina had competed in exactly two states, with results that can only be described as pathetic.  She won exactly one delegate and a mere 15,191 popular votes—half the number of the people she fired when she was busy running Hewlett-Packard into the ground.

Perhaps smiling Ted Cruz thinks that Carly Fiorina is going to help him in her home state of California, which might just yet provide the last opportunity to stop the Trump locomotive from winning the nomination outright.  If that is the case, Cruz would be well advised to dispose of such a delusion along with the rest of the trash.

Six years ago, Fiorina used a considerable personal fortune to buy a Republican Senatorial nomination in California.  When she finally ran for the Senate—running in a year that was overwhelmingly favorable to Republican candidates all across the land—she was crushed by Barbara Boxer, the incumbent Democrat.  Why would California Republicans, for a second time, wager their votes and the future of their party on such a bad bet?  Why, one must ask, is Cruz crazy enough to think that Carly can save him?