Be afraid, be very afraid. Redstate‘s Erick Erickson is extremely pleased that Ted Cruz won the Republican senate primary in Texas:
Despite all the barbs and lies and dirty tricks, including phone calls to Cruz voters during yesterday’s primary telling them to vote today, Ted Cruz won.
It is a very satisfying victory. Ted has spoken at every RedState Gathering and will be the first speaker at this year’s Gathering too. He will make a fine Senator.
A lot of people are going to give lots of credit to lots of people for Ted Cruz’s win. Success has many fathers. A lot of people will also make a lot of wild claims about what it means for the GOP and its supposed radical drift right — a drift right that in 2010 saw it pick up more electoral victories than any time since the late 1800′s.
One thing a lot of people will fail to comment on is that the Tea Party victories of 2010 have morphed into anti-establishment victories in 2012. On both the left and right, the base hates its leaders. It has moved beyond distrust to contempt…
Should Ted Cruz win the general election, and the odds are in his favor, he will join Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, and Ron Johnson as yet another Senator who owed his nomination more to Jim DeMint than the Republican leaders in Congress…
Dave Weigel at Slate explicates the “Strike Force” excitement:
… Sen. Jim DeMint endorsed Cruz more than one year ago, when Rick Perry was entering the presidential race and looked like a possible presidential candidate — it was a kind of brave, early stance. The Club for Growth spent $4.8 million on behalf of Cruz, who never caught up to Dewhurst in fundraising.
The goal, as DeMint and Clubbers have said many times, is to create a conservative wing inside the Senate GOP — an army of DeMints. When Cruz gets to Washington (he just has to roll over a token Democratic opponent), he joins Rand Paul (age 49), Marco Rubio (age 41), Mike Lee (age 41), Pat Toomey (age 50), and Ron Johnson (age 57). There’s a good chance he’ll join Rep. Jeff Flake, who turns 50 this year. That’s a sizable caucus of obstinate conservatives who have, respectively, threatened to filibuster spending deal compromises, called for quicker action in Syria, called the president’s move on the Libya NFZ unconstitutional, argued that the government could operate without raising the debt limit, and… well, threatened more filibusters. This is a rising generation of conservatives who just added to their number with a candidate who argued that Rick Perry’s candidate was too left-wing.
Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly‘s Political Animal blog adds:
…As Dave Weigel explains, there is virtually no legitimate ideological reason for the national movement conservative prefererence for Cruz over Dewhurst. It is all about his age (42) and ethnicity. Republicans understand the demographic trap they are in, which they might escape this year and in 2014 by revving up white-identity resentment of Barack Obama to a high-pitch chattering whine, but can’t forestall forever. They can appeal to minority voters by changing the ideology, or just finding minority candidates who will speak and vote like an angry 75-year-old white man from Alabama. The former strategy is not an option for them.
So conservatives need some possibilities other than Marco Rubio to become Latino poster persons going forward: Rubio is Cuban-American, which is not helpful with many Spanish speaking constituencies, and also has some potential ethics issues in his background. Dewhurst was entirely expendable. So expect Ted Cruz to get a lot of attention beginning at the Republican Convention in Tampa, and continuing at next year’s CPAC conference.
And yet, what with ratfvcking each other in Texas and vociferously defending Romney’s “No Apologies, Only Insults and Gaffes” World Tour, there doesn’t seem to have been much reaction on the right to the news that, per NYMag‘s Daily Intel, Castro Will Deliver the DNC Keynote Address.