S******8
发帖数: 24594 | 1 Ted Cruz Has No Chance Against Donald Trump
Rather than simply bowing out gracefully in the face of overwhelming
evidence nobody likes him, Texas Senator Ted Cruz will continue to run in
the Republican primary for the White House. However, Cruz appears to have
decided to offer up some Texas-sized laughter, pulling out his Joker card.
Ted Cruz has resurrected the political career of none other than Carly
Fiorina, asking her to be his running mate on the Cruz for President 2016
ticket.
The move has little political value, given that Cruz is all but defeated. He
is only surviving mathematically. He needed to pull a charismatic move to
raise enthusiasm among his supporters, so he picked Carly Fiorina. The logic
may have been to exploit her Silicon Valley credentials, which can be seen
as a signal of discontinuity—for a candidate that over the months has
become more and more the benchmark for the Party bigwigs—to win over the
vote of younger conservatives.
It’s more likely, however, that Cruz picked Fiorina because she is a woman.
He could have picked Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina (who claims Indian
American descent) or Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico.
He’s relying on those voters dismayed by Trump’s misogyny to walk over to
his camp. The misogyny, calculates Cruz, will grow even bigger as the
Republican primary wanes and leading candidate Trump takes the fight to
Hillary. In fact, Cruz has just doubled up on the looser quotient.
Cruz, who clerked for Judge William Rehnquist, wants voters to know he has
some recipes to cook bacon using a machine gun. Cruz reminds me of Elmer
Fudd, totally lacking in the cartoon character’s charm. He’s certainly not
going to get Bugs Bunny’s vote.
As for Fiorina, her much-touted business acumen and distaste for bureaucracy
has a big name: Hewlett Packard. Fiorina led HP from 1999 to 2005. Of her
tenure, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale University said she was one of the worst
CEOs ever because she “destroyed half the wealth of her investors and yet
still earned almost $100.0 million in total payments for this destructive
reign of terror.” (Source: “Ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina is planning to run for
president based on her business experience. Here’s why that’s a terrible
idea,” Business Insider, March 30, 2015.)
Carly Fiorina seemed to rise somewhat, and briefly, last September. She
performed well during some of the first televised debates, where she managed
to gain some national notoriety. Yet, she failed to use that as a base to
climb higher. Even if she, like Trump, is not a professional politician—
though she did run against Sen. Barbara Boxer in California and lost—the
reputation from her years as CEO of HP precede her, and they don’t help.
Cruz has made alliances with other Republican nomination candidates, namely
John Kasich, to stop the Trump momentum. The calculation is that by joining
forces, Kasich and Cruz would serve as the lightning rod to absorb all anti-
Trump votes. The plan was for Kasich to avoid the Indiana primary, allowing
Cruz to get his votes as well. Cruz would do the same for Kasich in Oregon
and New Mexico. (Source: “The unprecedented deal between Cruz and Kasich to
stop Trump is collapsing,” Business Insider, April 29, 2016.) Cruz and
Kasich thus hoped to prevent GOP frontrunner Trump from winning the
remaining 1,237 delegates to lock in the Republican nomination before the
July convention.
That deal is already failing before reaching the execution stage. (Source:
Ibid.) This leaves Cruz with Carly Fiorina as his “trump” card.
The actual Donald Trump is amused and maybe more than a little baffled. For
one, thing, even the unabashedly self-confident and arrogant Donald Trump
has not chosen a running mate yet. Normally, candidates don’t announce such
things until they have the nomination in the bag. | B*Q
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