On the same day David Cameron announced his retirement, Senator Ted Cruz became the first person to enter the race for the US presidency. Both announcements were a bit premature: Cameron still faces the small task of making sure he has a job to retire from, and the first presidential primaries are almost a year away. It remains to be seen which of them will be the last to leave the political stage.
Cruz’s exit may take longer, but it’s more certain: he’s never gonna be president, or even the Republican candidate. He’s just the first of a clutch of free-market-loving, gay-marriage-hating, climate-change-denying loons to throw his hat in the ring, and of those he isn’t even the most popular among people who like that sort of thing: in a recent straw poll of conservative activists he came third.
Cruz is fond of telling crowds that he intends to “abolish” the Internal Revenue Service – the federal agency that collects taxes – and send its 110,000 agents to police the border with Mexico. It’s the kind of line that guarantees applause at rallies – no one likes paying taxes. But it does nothing to convince the wider voting public that he’s sane, especially after it’s been pointed out that the IRS has nothing like 110,000 agents (according to Factcheck.org it has 82,000 employees in total, about a quarter of them agents).
That’s not to say that Cruz doesn’t have a strategy. In his creepy announcement speech, he noted that half of born-again Christians don’t vote, and asked his audience – the students of Liberty University, where evolution ain’t on the curriculum – to imagine “millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values”.
The figures don’t seem to bear out his vision. Half of Americans don’t vote. Evangelical Christians do considerably better, mustering a turnout of about 62%. But evangelicals represent at most a quarter of the population (some estimates say 7%) and they don’t all vote Republican. Cruz is a brilliant lawyer and academic who has perfected the art of sounding like a paranoid simpleton. Normally in US politics you can’t write people like that off, but I’m telling you now: write him off.
Don’t mention the C-word
Ted Cruz also belongs to that curious subgroup of US presidential hopefuls who aren’t quite as American as might be hoped. His mother was from Delaware, but he was born in Canada and had dual citizenship until he renounced his Canadian heritage in 2014.
He’s not alone. John McCain, you may recall, was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Mitt Romney was born in America, but his dad George, who ran for president in 1968, was born in Mexico. Barack Obama is a notable exception to the trend, with a birth certificate to prove it.
The rule is that you have to be a “natural-born citizen” to be president, which most experts agree doesn’t mean you must be born on US soil. But not everyone is in accord. “He was born in Canada,” Donald Trump has said of Cruz. “And when we all studied our history lessons, you’re supposed to be born in this country, so I don’t know how the courts would rule on it.” Say what you like about Trump – he’s an equal opportunities “birther”.
At the mercy of the dogs
I began writing this at my desk, but I’m finishing up lying flat on the floor, typing with my thumbs on an iPad held above my head. My back has gone. My vintage office chair has become an instrument of torture. I’ve hung on to it for years because it looks cool, but it may finally have to go. It’s not that I mind working from the bedroom floor; it’s just that I’m a bit worried about what the dogs will do when they find out I can’t move.
