Last Sunday at Turbocam, Ted Cruz was asked by Carlos when he was going to announce his run for the Presidency – you can see the video here as Cruz was a bit out front (and coy) with his answer. Well, we now have the answer from the new GraniteGrok Twitter follower, Ted Schleifer ( @TeddySchleifer ) from the Houston Chronicle (reformatted, emphasis mine):
Ted Cruz to announce presidential bid Monday
Sen. Ted Cruz plans to announce Monday that he will run for president of the United States, accelerating his already rapid three-year rise from a tea party insurgent in Texas into a divisive political force in Washington. Cruz will launch a presidential bid outright rather than form an exploratory committee, said senior advisers with direct knowledge of his plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because an official announcement had not been made yet. They say he is done exploring and is now ready to become the first Republican presidential candidate.
The senator is scheduled to speak Monday at a convocation ceremony at Liberty University in Virginia, where he is expected to declare his campaign for the presidency.
Over the course of the primary campaign, Cruz will aim to raise between $40 million and $50 million, according to advisers, and dominate with the same tea party voters who supported his underdog Senate campaign in 2012. But the key to victory, Cruz advisers believe, is to be the second choice of enough voters in the party’s libertarian and social conservative wings to cobble together a coalition to defeat the chosen candidate of the Republican establishment.
So, now the Establishment GOP have their opportunity to sneer, but I am betting that the grassroots are smiling. This will be interesting to see how the Establishment will come out, with their surrogates, against Cruz. In doing so, they will have to walk a real fine line – as Cruz just intimated on WMUR’s Closeup, all the Establishment has to do is tick off the grassroots and they’ll end up with Governor Havenstein, Senator from NH Scott Brown, and Presidents Ford, Dole, McCain, and Romney…
Oh wait….and the vote analysis showed that the Conservatives stayed home. Sure, the “Republican Republicans for the sake of the Republican Party” got angry with mutterings of “you let a Democrat win again” as if it was the Conservatives’ fault. Flip that around – the RRftsotRPs will vote for pretty much any Republican nominee: it’s who they are. So why not vote for a real Conservative and unite the Party?!
After all, it’s what we keep hearing from the Establishment, isn’t it?
