A.B. Stoddard: What is Sen. Cruz selling?

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) admitted last weekend he made “mistakes” with his push to defund ObamaCare that inspired the government shutdown of 2013. It was in little-noticed remarks to a gathering of the Club For Growth in Florida that Cruz conceded his Cruz-ade would never have worked without “an almost perfect storm” and said he was never “Polyannaish about the political factors,” which is a euphemism for knowing you never had the votes.

{mosads}It makes you wonder what the more than 2 million people who signed the petition on Cruz’s website, many of whom donated money to the defunding effort, make of his confession now. Back then they heard him thundering against “fake fights” and “fake votes” and were reading this on his website: “Republicans can stop Obamacare if they refuse to fund it.”

Don’t worry, Cruz didn’t take responsibility for doing anything wrong or stupid, lamenting his biggest mistake was that “I and our allies did not spend enough time explaining the specific strategy to elite opinion makers. … And I think there was confusion that made it less effective.” 

Maybe if the elite opinion-makers had understood it, they would have joined in selling it. Then again, elite opinion makers probably couldn’t count how few votes the defunders had to override a presidential veto.

Cruz went on, predictably, to blame the leadership for torpedoing his bad-faith effort. “What we did not anticipate was the Senate Republican leadership would actively, vigorously, vocally lead the fight against House Republicans,” he said. “Once that happened it became almost impossible to win that battle.”

Cruz knows that shutting things down is no longer in vogue. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) allowed a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), without the language to block President Obama’s immigration executive orders that conservatives wanted, to pass Tuesday with mostly Democrats. He was more willing to face conservative outrage than be blamed for shutting down the DHS.

After all that “real change” Cruz promised, the only change is he is now running for president. His consultants have obviously explained to him that becoming the face of gridlock and congressional dysfunction again would make him an easy target of GOP governors running on their hefty reform records, such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush or Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who joined Cruz in the defunding effort only to run from it later, would also be tempted to pile on, and a viral rebuke from fellow Tea Party favorite Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who is far more popular in the polls, is probably more than Cruz’s fledgling candidacy could bear.

Ever since the shutdown of 2013, Cruz has continued to build his influence with conservative hard-liners in Congress; he is known to gather with a group of House Republicans at a restaurant near the Capitol, and one of his own staffers has dropped in on House Republican staff meetings. But Cruz did not stall or block passage of the DHS bill. He did, however, blast the leadership again, telling reporters this week “it was abundantly clear to anyone watching that leadership in both houses intended to capitulate on the fight against amnesty.”

It’s worth noting that fresh after becoming the poster child for the 2013 shutdown, Cruz declared in January 2104 that it was wrong for Democrats to have shut down the government. No matter that Republicans had paraded around in hair shirts for months over their mistake. “I didn’t threaten to shut down the government the last time,” Cruz said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.” “I don’t think we should ever shut down the government.”

One could conclude that Cruz is so confusing he’s “less effective.”

Stoddard is an associate editor of The Hill.