Ted Cruz’s “Bold Colors”
By Jeff Shesol, THE NEW YORKER, March 24, 2015
Ted Cruz might want you to imagine that he did not use the word “imagine” as relentlessly as he
did in his speech at Liberty University on Monday, kicking off his campaign for the White
House. But I might be imagining that. Cruz’s mantra has been ridiculed everywhere from the
editorial page of the Times (“it seemed as if John Lennon had returned”) to Real Clear Politics
(“Imagine the Unintended Irony of Ted Cruz”), yet Cruz is not a man given to regret or selfreflection. If he were, he would never have invited us to picture him as a kid in the nineteeneighties “heading off to school over a thousand miles away from home, at a place where he knew
nobody, where he was alone and scared.” The name of that school, which he neglected to
mention, is Princeton University, where he was the president of the Ivy Council, the star of the
debate team, and a member of one of the school’s oldest eating clubs. Any of those experiences
might have been lonely and scary, but that, let’s be honest, is hard to imagine.
Toward the end of his speech, Cruz asked his audience to “imagine it’s 1979 and you and I were
listening to Ronald Reagan.” (“Woo!” went the Liberty students.) Among the aspirants for the
Republican nomination, Cruz is not alone in positioning himself as Reagan’s true heir, but he
has, perhaps, been the most insistent about it. Cruz has quoted variants of Reagan’s line that
Republicans should wave “a banner of bold colors, no pastel shades” so frequently that crowds
have begun to shout the words “bold colors” as he speaks them. In 2013, at the annual Reagan
Dinner, in Des Moines, Cruz posited that “we’re facing a new paradigm in politics,” adding,
without fear of self-contradiction, that the new paradigm “was beta-tested in 1980 with the
Reagan revolution.” At last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Cruz vowed to
“bring back Morning in America”; in February, before the same audience, Cruz said that he was
“convinced 2016 is going to be an election very much like 1980,” right down to Reagan’s
antagonisms. “It’s worth remembering, when Reagan ran, Washington despised Reagan,” Cruz
said. He has that part covered.
In fairness, Cruz is not the political equivalent of a tribute band. His performance on Monday—
part revival meeting, part TED talk—owes little, if anything, to Reagan’s conversational style.
Cruz engages the audience more directly, and takes more obvious pleasure in the applause; when
a line lands, he cocks his head back with self-satisfaction. But the echoes were there, each no
doubt deliberate: twice, Cruz evoked the “shining city on a hill,” Reagan’s twist on John
Winthrop’s phrase, and he described a mounting, government-led assault on liberty in the same
apocalyptic terms as “A Time for Choosing,” Reagan’s seminal speech of 1964. And, as Cruz
took flight in his peroration, he did so on the wings of Reagan—recalling that moment in 1979
when Reagan “was telling us that we would cut the top marginal tax rate from seventy per cent
all the way down to twenty-eight per cent, that we would go from crushing stagnation to
booming economic growth to millions being lifted out of poverty and into prosperity and
abundance … and that, within a decade, we would win the Cold War and tear the Berlin Wall to
the ground.”
Cruz’s reference to 1979, rather than 1980, the Presidential-election year, is an allusion to
Reagan’s own campaign announcement speech, a half-hour, paid television broadcast on
November 13, 1979. Watching that speech today, however, only reinforces why Republicans
such as Cruz and Rand Paul and Scott Walker should stop comparing themselves to Reagan: it
makes them look like a bunch of kids. Reagan manages to appear statesmanlike despite the fact
that the production values are, by today’s standards, laughable; the set of his taped message
looks like one of those offices in late-night ads for personal-injury law firms, and the broadcast
opens with Reagan, seated in a leather chair, caught in the act of reading an almost comically
thick book—a dictionary? Artifice aside, and demagoguery about “the arrogance of [the] federal
establishment” notwithstanding, Reagan’s speech was serious, not strident, in tone, and ventured
a credible argument—that “this nation hungers for a spiritual revival; hungers to once again see
honor placed above political expediency, to see government once again the protector of our
liberties, not the distributor of gifts and privilege.”
As the Times reporter Adam Clymer observed the next day, the Ronald Reagan of 1979 “was not
the harsh, anti-Washington candidate of 1976,” who had tried to unseat incumbent Republican
President Gerald Ford by “feeding red meat to the Republican right in a necessary effort to
substitute enthusiasm for breadth of support.” Instead, he was restrained, even reflective. Some
conservatives worried that their man had lost his zeal. But, “if you’re trying to get elected,”
James Lake, Reagan’s press secretary, explained, “you combat the perception that some people
have of you as a strident, right-wing conservative.” “Bold colors,” were out, Clymer wrote, at
least for the time being. “Last night,” Reagan “seemed to choose pastels.”
Bold colors may be the only option right now for Cruz, whose immediate and existential need is
to stand out in a crowded field of conservative candidates who outpoll him by orders of
magnitude. To that end, Cruz is emulating the only Reagan he is capable of emulating—the
strident one, the losing one—which is, or ought to be, another object lesson in the perils of
emulating Reagan at all. “If there is one thing we are sure of,” Reagan said in his announcement
speech of 1979, “it is that history need not be relived.” Imagine if Cruz, or any Republican
contender, were to heed that message.