A crowd of hundreds packed Edwards Barn in Nipomo to see Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz stump June 22. Cruz is in town for the 70th birthday of his father-in-law, Peter Nelson, who practiced dentistry in SLO. Attendees paid $25 a head to hear Cruz’s stump speech and participate in a question-and-answer session after.
Cruz—a senator and former solicitor general for Texas well known for his 21-hour Senate floor speech in opposition to Obamacare (and advocating for a government shutdown, which happened days later)—drew several rounds of applause and occasional whooping during the event. He condemned Obamacare as “one size fits all, jammed onto everyone” and made the case that gay marriage had put religious freedom “in the crosshairs.”
He warned against intrusion by the United Nations into the U.S. judicial system but stressed the importance of the veto power the United States holds as a member of the security council, calling it “the one thing that defends Israel from vicious anti-semitism” and called criticism of Israel’s human rights record “gross, libelous, and false.”
On his first day in the Oval Office, Cruz joked, he would send “flowers and condolences to all the reporters checking themselves into therapy.” Then, growing more serious, he promised to convene his national security team to assess the threat from Iran, mentioning “theocratic lunatics who want to murder us.”
“For conservatives, California is tough right now,” Cruz said, adding the state’s right wing was “beleaguered” and “outnumbered.” He’s right—Democrats hold a supermajority in the state Assembly and Senate.
At 55 electoral votes, the state is a heavyweight of the Electoral College. California voted solidly Republican between 1952 and 1988—only Lyndon B. Johnson managed to buck that trend. Clinton took California in the 1992 election, and the state’s electoral votes have eluded the GOP in the two decades since.
Where electoral votes are scarce, however, campaign contributions are more plentiful.
“We need the resources,” Cruz leveled. “Everything we do is a fundraiser.”
Republican candidates squeezed nearly $50 million from the state in 2012, with Romney adding $40 million to his war chest for the general election campaign.
Cruz’s wife, Heidi, raised in the area, met him while they were working as policy aides for Bush’s 2000 campaign. They were married five months later.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 2, 2015.
