Top 10 reasons to vote for Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz rescinding ObamaDavid P. Goldman (aka Spengler) is one of the smartest thinkers and writers out there.  He’s knowledgeable, an insightful analyst, and leads with his brain, not his belly button.  So if Goldman puts together a list of the top ten reasons to vote for Ted Cruz, you can be damn sure that they’re not only superb reasons why Cruz should get the highest job in the land, they’re also not just a bare-bones laundry list, but are supported by facts and detailed analysis.  Read this list and tell me if it doesn’t make you feel more comfortable giving Ted Cruz the top spot:

A month ago I predicted a Cruz-Rubio ticket. Now that Cruz has overtaken Carson to run neck-and-neck with Trump in the Iowa Quinnipiac University poll, Cruz is looking a lot like a winner. Here are my top 10 reasons to back him.

10. He really knows economics–not the ideologically driven pablum dished out at universities, but the real battlefield of entrenched monopolies against entrepreneurial upstarts. As Asheesh Agarwal and John Delacourt reported in this space, he did a brilliant job at the Federal Trade Commission: “Cruz promoted economic liberty and fought government efforts to rig the marketplace in favor of special interests. Most notably, Cruz launched an initiative to study the government’s role in conspiring with established businesses to suppress e-commerce. This initiative ultimately led the U.S. Supreme Court to open up an entire industry to small e-tailers.” Anyone can propose tax cuts. It takes real know-how to cut through the regulatory kudzu that is strangling America enterprise.

9. He really knows foreign policy. He is a hardline defender of American interests, but wants to keep American politics out of the export business. That’s why neo-conservatives like Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post and Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal keep sliming him. The Bushies started attacking Cruz a year ago, when he stated the obvious about the Bush administration’s great adventure in “democratic globalism”: “I think we stayed too long, and we got far too involved in nation-building….We should not be trying to turn Iraq into Switzerland.” He’s not beholden to the bunglers of the Bush administration, unlike the hapless Marco Rubio.

8. He really knows the political system. As Texas solicitor general, he argued nine cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and won five of them. How many other lawyers in the United States have gone to the Supreme Court nine times on points of Constitutional law? The best write-up I’ve seen on his brilliance as a Constitutional lawyer came from the liberal New Yorker–grudging praise, but praise nevertheless. Some of his legal work was brilliant, displaying a refined understanding of separation of powers and federalism. If you want a president who knows the mechanism of American governance from the inside, there’s no-one else who comes close to Cruz.

7. He’s an outsider, and America needs an outsider. The public thinks that Washington is corrupt, and it IS corrupt. The banks are corrupt, the defense industries (with their $1.5 trillion budget for a new fighter plane that won’t fly) are corrupt, the tech companies (run by patent trolls rather than engineers) are corrupt, the public utilities are corrupt. The American people want a new broom. But it helps to put it in the hands of someone who knows his way around the broom closet.

6. Trump and Carson aren’t serious candidates. Carson is an endearing fellow who has no business running for president: apart from his medical specialty, his knowledge of the world is an autodidact’s jumble of fact and fantasy. Donald Trump inherited money and ran a family business: never in his life did he have to persuade shareholders, investors, directors, or anyone else to work with him. At best, he knew how to cajole and threaten. It’s been his way or the highway since he was a kid, and that’s the worst possible training for a U.S. president.

Read the rest here.

The more I know about Cruz, and the more I know about his Republican challengers, the more I think that he is the man and this is the time.  This is not to denigrate the other Republican candidates.  I think each offers something interesting to the debate.  Some, like Jeb!, might have been perfect candidates in different times.  Others, like Trump and Carson, although I believe neither would be a good president (temperament and experience, or lack thereof), say important things about our culture and politics, and have added immensely to the dynamics of this election season.