Ted Cruz had a great night last night. Unlike Marco Rubio, he didn’t back down from criticizing Donald Trump, still civilly and on substance as he always has. Nor did Cruz have to resort to practicing his patented yoga tricks on Trump to get him to be quiet and let someone else talk.
And according to Frank Luntz, Cruz also had the single best moment of the night, hitting 100 percent approval from focus group conservatives (and 94 percent from moderates) with this promise:
There are bureaucrats in Washington right now who are killing jobs, and I tell you I know who they are, I will find them, and I will fire them.
Cruz connected government to the ongoing economic slump: “the more bureaucrats, the less prosperity.”
And at the same time he pointed out Donald Trump shares Hillary Clinton’s conceit that the only thing wrong with Washington is that we need smarter people in command there.
This commanding Cruz moment tops what Frank Luntz had previously described as the highest approval he had ever seen in a GOP debate focus group, 98 percent — which, by the way, was another great Cruz debate moment when he slammed the CNBC moderators’ bias in last October’s debate.
Ted Cruz, one of Prof. Robert P. George’s smartest students ever, must be loving that 100 percent mark.
Maggie Gallagher is a senior fellow at the American Principles Project.
