Artur Davis: What Liberals Are Missing About Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz’s Senate win in Texas was no upset by the time he pulled it off, and for all of the necessary public posturing from David Dewhurst’s camp, it would taken scandal or a natural disaster to arrest Cruz’s momentum. Every atmospheric detail favored Cruz, from his assiduous courting of the state’s Tea Party activists while Dewhurst confused checks from the Texas GOP establishment with a voter base; to the edge primaries usually confer on insurgent candidacies; to the fact that Cruz demonstrated a quick learning curve as a first-timer, while Dewhurst had not run a competitive race in about a decade.

There will be a substantial case made today, as Ed Kilgore already has in The New Republic, that Cruz’s win is primarily emblematic of the ongoing internal coup in Republican ranks by far-right, anti-accommodation jihadists. It’s certainly right that Dewhurst was tabbed as an Austin insider who was too cozy with the state’s ruling class, but it’s hard to attribute that line of attack to a particular ideological mantra—especially in this case, when by Kilgore’s own account, Dewhurst had no real ideological apostasies for Cruz to tout.  While much of the mainstream commentary tries to have it both ways, assuming Cruz’s win proves the hard-right tilt of GOP primaries and simultaneously conceding Dewhurst’s conservative bona fides, it’s at most more likely, and at least worth considering that Cruz’s outsider status mattered considerably more than litmus tests.

Recognizing that the Texas race was one between two mainline conservatives and not a reprise of, say Christine O’Donnell and a avowed moderate like Mike Castle, upends a certain narrative about tea partiers in Texas and elsewhere. It’s a liberal article of faith that the Tea Party’s rise is fueled by a militancy that would level government to the ground; in reality, it’s much more a symptom of an altogether plausible conclusion—that government at every level has veered off course, lost touch with popular sentiment, fallen into the grip of monied interests, and struggled to deliver even core public services. In other words, a gripe that liberals themselves sound often enough, and hardly one outside the realm of regular political discourse.

The other flawed insight is that Cruz is proof of some mildly cynical, entirely strategic plot to gin up minority candidates: under this theory, it’s the conservative flavor of identity politics, meant to disguise a record destructive of the very minority interests being courted. It’s a critique that struggles to find support anywhere, much less this race, given that Cruz, like Marco Rubio, was actually the opposite of a recruitment project. To the contrary, the GOP establishment in both races worked aggressively to clear the eventual winner from the field and to award the nomination to the career politician next in line. That the effort failed says much about the skill of Cruz and Rubio, and the teams around them, something about the discredited nature of establishments in general, and literally nothing about grand conspiratorial or strategic designs.

And it is this last aspect of Cruz’s ascension that matters a great deal, arguably as much to the future of politics as the Democratic Party’s decision to embrace gay marriage as a partisan principle in its upcoming platform. The fact is less that Republicans are explicitly recruiting Latino statewide candidates, more that Republican voters are proving increasingly willing to embrace talented, credentialed candidates who have appeal beyond their racial roots, as long as those candidates are philosophically compatible with their way of looking at the world.

In contrast, as I have written in this blog and elsewhere, Democratic minority politicians have been hampered by a low and conspicuous glass ceiling, especially in the last several cycles. Part of the reason is that whatever their skill level, Democratic Latino or black politicians virtually always gain entree to politics through representing districts that are either ethnic or in a few cases, just monolithically liberal. Predictably, that path has yielded minorities who are defined early as spokespersons for their own communities, and whose voting records are well to the left of center–a weak formula for statewide office even in blue states, a ludicrously weak one in red or border states.

In the last 20 years, the rare Democratic minority breakthroughs at the gubernatorial or Senate level have been in states where Democrats had a massive edge in party ID (Massachusetts in 06), Republicans fielded negligible opposition (Illinois in 04) or in special cases like the “Year of the Woman” for Carol Mosely Braun in 92, or Bob Menendez’s emergence in a machine dominated Democratic environment like New Jersey, where Republicans have not won a Senate race since 72.

What Democrats have done infrequently in 20 years–elect minorities to lead or represent their entire states–Republicans did four times in the 2010 cycle alone, and will do again with Cruz this November. Its a trend that the next generation of Latino, black, and Indian political talents can’t help but see, and in the next ten years, it will redefine the racial contours of both conservatism and American politics.

(Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from OfficialArturDavis.com)