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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Thursday, February 25, 2016 | A11
OPINION
Trump Is Killing Cruz
Ted Cruz has
to be wondering: What happened?
In the wake
of his thirdplace finish in
WONDER
Nevada, Mr.
LAND
Cruz’s case for
By Daniel
himself
is:
Henninger
Don’t forget
Iowa. He has
come a long way.
In the fall of 2013, the freshman Texas senator rolled the
dice so boldly that the biggest
congressional Texan of all time,
Lyndon Johnson, would have
been agog. Sen. Cruz, with the
whole Republican Party raging
at him, pulled off a shutdown
Ted Cruz’s election
strategy was plausible
until Trump stole it.
of the U.S. government. He
publicized the shutdown with a
21-hour speech on the Senate
floor, attacking other Republicans for not joining his Pickett’s charge against ObamaCare, then a federal law.
Ted Cruz knew amid this
GOP chaos that he was going to
run for president in 2016. He
had the game plan in hand.
The plan was to make a
household name for himself as
the Republican Party’s bestknown outsider. A narrative
back then held that a deep
wave of anger at the party’s
leadership was building in the
heartland. Ted Cruz was going
to personally deepen the anger
and then ride it.
It would surface with a victory in Iowa, which he got,
build in South Carolina, and
then surge through Super
Tuesday and especially Texas
with an unstoppable number of
Cruz delegates fished from this
angry Republican sea of outsiders—tea partiers, anti-immigrant voters, pro-Snowden libertarians, evangelicals and
anyone foaming mad at Barack
Obama. The mad-as-hell vote.
It was a plausible primary
strategy, elegant even in its
mathematical inevitability, despite the crushed-glass content.
Until Donald Trump stole
the whole thing.
Sen. Cruz, the self-designed
outsider, is getting killed by the
outsider from hell.
Somewhere in the South on
Super Tuesday Sen. Cruz may
yet get back on track a plan
that was going to let him
thumb his nose at a resentful
Republican Senate from behind
that big desk in the Oval Office.
More likely, Ted Cruz is about
to join Jeb Bush, Rick Perry,
Scott Walker and Chris Christie
as a Trump trophy.
But this one is different. If
Ted Cruz falls, he’ll take a lot
of the activist right with him.
This was never a one-man
show. The Cruz strategy was
supported by an array of political factions whose goal was to
make the Cruz candidacy a vehicle for seizing operational
control of the Republican Party.
Those groups included
political fundraising operations such as Heritage Action,
FreedomWorks, the Senate
Conservatives Fund, a variety
of Web-based political entre-
preneurs and white-hot radio.
Because the goal was seizing political power, the pitch to
audiences wasn’t complicated.
It was Us versus Them. We are
“real conservatives,” and
“they” are not. They are “the
Establishment,” a term made
up from nothing.
The distinctions were also
simple.
Immigration: We are for
“controlling the borders.” They
are for “amnesty.”
Trade: They are for trade
promotion authority. Real conservatives are against TPA.
Both are serious issues, but
policy details were an impediment to the takeover.
It was a kind of bitter fun
while it lasted. It lasted until
Donald Trump’s June 2015
presidential announcement in
which he said: I’m just gonna
grab all of that stuff . . . and
make it simpler.
The Mexican-built wall, the
Muslim ban, the trade war with
China, whatever. By the time
we all got to South Carolina,
Donald Trump had transformed Ted Cruz and the “real
conservative” insurrection into
. . . the Establishment.
He is killing them. He is
reaping the politics they
worked to sow—on immigration, on trade and on inchoate
anger.
Exit polls show Sen. Cruz
winning a plurality of the
“very conservative” vote. But
there aren’t enough “very conservative” voters to win anything now because Donald
Trump is siphoning 33% of
everything else.
The Cruz camp might argue
that it has as much chance as
Marco Rubio in a one-on-one
contest against the Trump 33%.
It’s far from clear, though, that
the Rubio-Bush-Kasich vote
would default to Sen. Cruz. The
Cruz media-support operation
for years has ridiculed vast
swaths of the Republican Party,
including lifelong Reagan conservatives, as the abhorrent
“mainstream” or the “donor
class.”
The goal was to separate
them from Ted Cruz. It worked.
Also in pieces is the Cruz
faction’s takeover of the Republican Party, what’s left of it.
Conventional wisdom holds
that the Trump insurgency is a
hostile takeover of the GOP. It
is not that.
Donald Trump is properly
understood as running an independent candidacy from inside
the formal structure of the Republican Party, as Mike
Bloomberg did to run for
mayor of New York City. Nothing remotely resembling a political party is associated with
Mr. Trump. If he loses the
nomination or the general election, he will walk away from
his Republican supporters by
dawn. The GOP will look like a
forest shredded by a tornado.
Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and
John Kasich have to decide if
the time has come to let Donald Trump define the Republican Party, or let the rest of the
Republicans choose either him
or someone else as the majority’s choice for their nominee.
Sen. Cruz already offered a
defined choice for the Republican Party. Donald Trump owns
that version. It’s a little late for
Mr. Cruz’s Plan B.
Write to [email protected]
The Donald Doesn’t Have a Lock—Yet
By Karl Rove
D
onald Trump scored a
very impressive win in
Nevada, taking 45.9%
and 14 of the state’s 30 delegates to the GOP convention.
But the Republican nomination
is far from settled. After four
contests, only 133 of the convention’s 2,472 delegates have
been selected.
It’s important to put Nevada
in context. Caucuses draw a
smaller turnout than primaries and 75,216—17.8% of the
state’s 423,308 Republicans—
turned out. While the number
of voters was higher than in
previous Silver State caucuses,
it would have required 128,685
Nevada Republicans voting to
match Iowa’s turnout.
After carrying 24.3% in
Iowa, 35.3% in New Hampshire
and 32.5% in South Carolina,
Mr. Trump hit a new high
Tuesday. Is he consolidating
Republicans? Perhaps, but a
single caucus victory does not
necessarily a consolidation
make.
None of the 12 Republican
hopefuls who have dropped out
of the race has endorsed Mr.
Trump. The Donald’s trademark insults, more pungent
and personal than run-of-themill campaign attacks, make it
difficult for those whom he
ridiculed, and their supporters, to rally to him.
The choices made by latedeciding voters would be a
sign of consolidation, but in
South Carolina Mr. Trump
drew only 17% of those who
By Fay Vincent
O
made up their mind in the
final week of the campaign.
Among the 30% in Nevada who
decided in the final week, Sen.
Marco Rubio carried 42%, far
more than any candidate.
In the eight February polls
of the states that vote between March 1 and March 8,
Mr. Trump takes an average of
32.3%. Sen. Ted Cruz and Mr.
Rubio take 21% and 19.9% respectively, with the remaining
26.8% split among other candidates and undecideds. Mr.
Trump is supported by better
than three of every 10 Republicans, but some 65% aren’t in
his camp.
The 963 delegates—39% of
the convention’s total—to be
selected in 24 contests between March 1 and March 12
will all be awarded proportionally. This means he could
win the headlines but capture
a minority of the delegates—
unless he unites the GOP.
To clarify: Assume Messrs.
Trump, Rubio, Cruz, Kasich
and Carson receive the same
percentage of voters in the
early March contests that
they did in South Carolina,
and Mr. Rubio inherits Jeb
Bush’s voters.
In that case, Mr. Trump
would emerge with 489 (or
44%) of the delegates. Mr. Rubio would have 330 and Mr.
Cruz 197, with 24 delegates
scattered elsewhere going into
the winner-take-all primaries
on the Ides of March. And that
assumes Mr. Trump wins everywhere.
Of course, not every candi-
date will get the same percentage as in South Carolina,
and Mr. Trump is unlikely to
win every state. Ben Carson
and John Kasich are likely to
become even less consequential, Dr. Carson because of
flagging resources and Gov.
Kasich because he is focusing
on Michigan’s March 8 contest
and Ohio’s March 15 primary,
making himself a non-factor
elsewhere.
There is still time for
a non-Trump majority
to coalesce around a
single candidate.
Still, as long as three or
more candidates are splitting
delegates in early March’s proportional contests, the race
could remain uncertain until
March 15, albeit with Mr. Trump
in the lead.
That’s why it was odd that
Trump strategists told Fox’s
Carl Cameron on the night of
the Nevada caucus that they
intend to knock out Mr. Cruz. I
would think they’d want Mr.
Cruz to remain in the race, to
keep non-Trump voters from
coalescing around a single alternative. After all, even a
weak Trump plurality on
March 15 would give him Florida’s 99 delegates and Ohio’s
66 delegates.
Additionally, if a majority of
Republicans oppose Mr. Trump
that day but are divided among
several candidates, he could
also take the lion’s share of Illinois’s 69 and Missouri’s 52 delegates.
These states award some
delegates at the statewide level
by winner-take-all. Illinois voters also select three delegates
from each congressional district
from a list of people pledged to
different candidates. Missouri
awards its congressional district delegates proportionally.
If Mr. Trump has a substantial delegate majority at day’s
end, it would take an extraordinary effort to defeat him,
even with 40% of the delegates
(most in proportional contests) remaining to be selected
after March 15. Put another
way: Donald Trump could well
have a lock on the nomination
after March 15 if a fragmented
opposition gives him an absolute majority of delegates on
that day.
There is still time for the
non-Trump GOP majority to
coalesce around a single candidate, but not much. Things can
remain somewhat divided on
March 1 as long as the majority is largely unified on March
8 and fully behind a single candidate on the Ides of March. If
not, the hopes of the party’s
non-Trump majority will suffer
the same fate as Caesar.
Mr. Rove helped organize
the political-action committee
American Crossroads and is
the author of “The Triumph of
William McKinley: Why the
1896 Election Still Matters”
(Simon & Schuster, 2015).
Life as the Ninth Inning Nears
ne of the many problems with advancing
age—not
old
age,
please—is there is too much
to read about the end of life.
Books and articles about dying are in vogue, but I could
not finish Dr. Atul Gawande’s
best-selling “Being Mortal.” I
do not want to know how
much my brain is shrinking
and why my teeth will fall
out. Spare me.
I am comforted by the realization that everyone is getting older and so we are all in
the same boat. My contemporaries share my experiences,
and they have the same fears
and many of the same limitations as I do.
I am still excited by good
books, and I try to persuade
others to read what has
thrilled me. But many of us
do not want to be pushed. We
prefer to discover good books
on our own.
My interest in sports—
baseball, of course—remains
strong, though it is narrower
than it used to be. I no longer watch hockey or boxing.
But I never miss the World
Series, or the Masters, in part
because of the captivating
My interest in sports
has narrowed. No more
hockey or boxing. But
baseball is forever.
natural beauty of the Augusta
golf course. Despite a football lineage—my dad was an
NFL official—I rarely watch
the second half of the Super
Bowl. The games are too
long, and half-time shows are
a bizarre reminder of music I
do not understand. Why is
there so much jumping up
and down?
I spend most of my time
in the company of my cherished wife. I think there is
truth in the old line that
older marrieds tend to resemble each other as time
goes by. I enjoy visits with
friends as well, but I have a
rule: None of us can speak
more than three sentences
about medical news. I am
certain my problems have
limited interest, and so, I fib
a lot when I am asked how I
am doing.
To me, old age seems to be
the art of keeping going.
Speed and direction are not
important. Movement is. I
swim but slowly. I barely
walk. I write, but with acute
knowledge that my values and
opinions are outdated. I still
think duty, honor and country
should be the national mantra. I know better.
The very best thing about
growing older is that I no
longer try to change anyone’s
mind. I can easily accept disagreement from friends and
even critics. I also have long
since surrendered any hope of
impressing others, or of being
impressed by them. In these
final innings I want to stay at
bat, even if I know I cannot
expect to get a hit.
I am not selling anything
nor am I buying. I want only
to be at peace and in normal
discomfort. Age makes life
simple until it does not.
Yes, the rear view mirror is
where I get the most pleasure. There I can run and
jump and shag high fly balls
in the many sunny baseball
fields of my youth. There are
still those joyful memories of
good times and old pals and
long dead family and friends.
That is what is left now, and
that has to be fine with me.
Mr. Vincent was formerly
CEO of Columbia Pictures
Industries, executive vice
president of Coca-Cola, and
the commissioner of Major
League Baseball, 1989-92.
BOOKSHELF | BY Thomas Main
No Shelter
From the Storm
Evicted
By Matthew Desmond
(Crown, 418 pages, $28)
‘E
viction,” Matthew Desmond writes in “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” “is a cause,
not just a condition, of poverty.” His argument in
this impressive work of scholarship is that eviction is such
an exploitative process, so biased in favor of profit-seeking
landlords, that it pitches otherwise capable tenants into crisis and thus into poverty. He offers two types of evidence for
his claim. The first is a novelistically detailed ethnographic
account of the lives of eight extremely poor Milwaukee families on the verge of eviction. The second is summaries of his
quantitative analyses of Milwaukee’s low-income rental
housing, which show that eviction is a much more frequent
event than has been thought and has long-term consequences for the health and stability of families.
As Mr. Desmond points out, eviction has been neglected by
urban sociologists, so his account fills a gap. His methodology
is scrupulous: He documents all his observations and employed
a fact checker to verify every detail. Unfortunately, the tone of
the book often resembles
that of less scholarly
chroniclers of urban misery, such as Jonathan Kozol.
“Evicted” is chock-full of
painful detail to the point of
being depressing, an effect
amplified by Mr. Desmond’s
sometimes overwritten prose.
We learn of Lamar, a former crack addict who broke
into an abandoned house one
freezing night while high and
fell asleep. His frostbitten legs
had to be amputated, and now
he struggles unsuccessfully to
pay his rent by doing poor-quality painting jobs for his landlord. Crystal, diagnosed with a half-dozen psychological
disorders and found to have an IQ of about 70, repeatedly
stomps on one roommate’s face during an altercation and
pushes another through a window. Scott was a successful
nurse until he got addicted to painkillers, lost his license,
started using heroin and plunged into poverty. When Vanetta’s
work hours are reduced, she makes the terrible decision to participate in a botched robbery, for which she is sent to prison,
leaving her children homeless. One hopes that this wrenching
account will galvanize rather than desensitize readers.
What are we to make of the subjects’ many maladaptive
behaviors, so frankly documented by Mr. Desmond? Does the
deep poverty cause the dysfunction, or does the dysfunction
cause the poverty? And do the landlords exploit the tenants,
or are the tenants quite a handful for the landlords? Certainly one of the book’s most striking vignettes, in which
poor, unrepresented tenants are marched through a housing
court and perfunctorily evicted, documents real unfairness.
On the other hand, the portrayal of the landlord Sherrena
shows her to be a canny, profit-seeking entrepreneur but
The owner of a seedy trailer park earns roughly
$447,000 a year. But if the profit were less,
would those accommodations remain available?
doesn’t document any clear illegality. (In one horrific scene,
a fire in one of Sherrena’s buildings leaves a child dead. Mr.
Desmond notes that “nobody had heard a smoke detector go
off” but does not say there was a code violation. A fire inspector finds no liability.) Of course, the harsh reality of extreme urban poverty is indeed depressing. But eight case
histories, out of Milwaukee’s approximately 105,000 renter
households, despite distressing instances of injustice, do not
in themselves prove his case.
The findings of Mr. Desmond’s quantitative studies, summarized mostly in the endnotes, provide more telling evidence. Here the author’s immersion in the milieu of extreme urban poverty pays off. He discovered that in many
cases of forced ejection (having to leave after missing a
rent payment, for example), the families involved simply
refused to describe themselves as evicted and were thus
not captured by narrow eviction statistics. The quantitative
surveys described here probe much deeper than earlier efforts and show that “forced moves”—understood as formal
or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation—are in fact quite common. Mr. Desmond and a
collaborator found that, from 2009 to 2011, 13% of Milwaukee renters had been evicted in this broad sense. Further,
renters thus evicted moved to neighborhoods that were on
average 5.4 percentage points poorer and 1.8 percentage
points more crime-ridden than the neighborhoods in which
renters who moved more voluntarily ended up. These findings lend considerable support to the claim that eviction
causes poverty.
Mr. Desmond’s policy recommendations are mostly convincing. Guaranteed legal representation for renters in housing court and a dramatic expansion of housing vouchers for
the poor sound like good ideas. Less compelling is his conclusion that landlord exploitation—“to profit excessively
from the less fortunate”—is a key reason for terrible housing
conditions. Mr. Desmond cites Martin Luther King saying
that “every condition exists simply because someone profits
by its existence.” But aren’t some people unemployed and
others homeless precisely because there is no profit in hiring
or housing them?
Mr. Desmond demonstrates that the owner of a seedy
trailer park earns roughly $447,000 a year. But if the profit
were significantly less, would those shabby accommodations
remain available? When Sherrena the landlord says, “the
’hood is good”—meaning that there is money to be made in
servicing the poor—we are apparently supposed to be
shocked. But suppose the “hood” were less profitable?
Would Sherrena still provide apartments there? Mr. Desmond himself acknowledges that “if we are going to house
most low-income families in theÚ private rental market, then
that market must remain profitable.”
The reader comes away from “Eviction” persuaded that
extreme urban poverty makes for intolerable conditions. But
the questions of how far the profit motive can be moderated
without perverse consequences and how much personal responsibility can realistically be expected of the poor are far
from settled.
Mr. Main is an associate professor at Baruch College’s
School of Public Affairs and the author of “Homelessness
in New York City: Policymaking From Koch to de Blasio.”