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Ted Cruz is a smarmy, hypocritical thug. And if the stories in Andy Kroll’s TNR report are any sample, Jeff Roe is his perfect campaign manager:
… Roe wasn’t an obvious choice to join Cruz’s team. He had no personal connection to the candidate. He’d worked only on the periphery of a couple of presidential campaigns—Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Perry in 2012. He’d never even managed a winning statewide race.
Roe knew Cruz was his guy. He had studied practically everything Cruz had ever done and said. Both men believed that politicians too often waffled in the face of opposition, and failed to deliver on what they promised to their strongest supporters. “It pisses me off,” Roe told me recently. Politicians, he said, leave voters “behind, they take them for granted. Because of that, less and less people participate in the system because their values continue to get trampled and they don’t feel like there is an outlet for them to do anything about it.”
Roe also pitched himself as singularly qualified to run Cruz’s presidential bid, touting a pedigree few, if any other, operatives had—how he’d built his own full-scale political operation from scratch, with multimillion-dollar budgets, dozens of employees, running everything from TV to direct mail, fund-raising, polling, research, strategy. And he was ready to put the whole thing on pause and move to Houston for Cruz—to go all in…
What we’ve yet to see in this campaign is Roe’s other trademark attribute: the brass-knuckled approach to winning that’s made him many enemies. From his earliest days running state and local campaigns, he’s taken a scorched-earth approach to politics. Roe and his tactics have been blamed for damaging opponents’ lives and reputations, and even for contributing to a gubernatorial candidate’s suicide. (Roe doesn’t exactly hide from this reputation: His web site features headlines describing him as “ruthless” and a “leading practitioner of hard-ball politics.”)…