What the Republicans desperately need to avoid, if they hope to win the White House in 2016, is a friendly nomination fight in which the viable candidates (like Jeb Bush) go easy on the non-viable candidates (like Cruz, Paul, & Carson) directing their attacks instead exclusively at the outgoing president and the presumptive Democratic nominee, while relying on dog whistles to satisfy and pacify the knuckle dragging, mouth breathing faction of the party’s primary electorate.
In discussing the presidential ambitions of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas with my mother recently I realized that the method to his madness was not actually foreign to me. My mother reminded me that he was employing a tactic that I perfected in my teenage years when I frequently frustrated the efforts of my parents to hold me accountable for various transgressions or my siblings' efforts to retrieve stolen goods from me. Senator Cruz, my mother assures me, simply [mis]appropriates the case against him, reversing the accuser and the accused in his telling. So simple, yet so confounding.