The clear hatred of the Republican establishment for Sen. Ted Cruz and the mainstream media’s genuine fear that the articulate Cruz could be the nominee of the Republican Party in 2016 were clearly revealed in a telling exchange on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Charlie Black—who worked on Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns in 1976, 1980, and 1984 before serving as senior political adviser to the 1992 re-election campaign of George H. W. Bush and chief campaign adviser for Sen. John McCain in 2008—bluntly told host Chuck Todd that Donald Trump will not be the nominee of the Republican Party.
Having dismissed Trump’s candidacy, Todd then turned to Alex Castellanos—who worked on the Dole campaign in 1996, the George W. Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004, and helped found Purple Strategies, a company headed by three Republicans and three Democrats.
Todd made it a point to exclude Cruz from his short list of alternatives to Trump, asking, “What’s clearly happened this week, though, is that you have all the campaigns are sitting going, ‘All right, we now have to deal with this for the long term and we have to adjust.’ We know what Jeb Bush is doing. He’s saying, ‘Fine, we’ll make it about us and Trump,’ because he sees Trump as a way to sort of black out the other candidates. What do you do if you’re Scott Walker or Marco Rubio right now?”
Castellanos, trying to be cute, answered, “Pray for rain.”
Todd followed, “Really, you think it’s that bad for them?”
Castellanos, without Todd even mentioning Ted Cruz, sneaked in his sucker punch from the establishment playbook:
He [Trump] is sucking up all the oxygen, and ultimately, he is sitting on the conservative wing of the Republican party. And by the way, I think that’s great news. Because I’m not a Ted Cruz fan. I don’t think Ted Cruz is the future of the Republican party. And Donald Trump, who is not going to be the nominee, which I think Charlie is exactly right about, is sitting on all of that.
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