Ted Cruz, false hope

THESE are ghastly times for thoughtful Republicans. If Donald Trump is their presidential nominee in November’s general election, they increasingly fear that the businessman will lead them to a defeat of epic, Napoleon-in-Russia proportions, after laying waste to their support among women, suburbanites, non-whites and those dismayed by thuggish violence. A growing number have decided that the remaining candidate with the best chance of halting Mr Trump’s march to the nomination is Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who has duly picked up endorsements from such former rivals as Jeb Bush, the ex-governor of Florida, and, most recently, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, whose state holds its presidential primary election on April 5th. But Mr Cruz is an unctuous ideologue whose entire pitch to date has been aimed at the most conservative third of the country, all but ensuring that—if he somehow became his party’s candidate—he would lead them to a merely conventional sort of November defeat.

A remarkable chance has been given to Mr Cruz by colleagues who never imagined they would need him so badly. Handed the battle-flag of the Stop Trump movement, he could attempt to rally Republicans of all stripes behind it. Without betraying his own principles, Mr Cruz could unite conservatives against Mr Trump by pointing out that the tycoon’s promises are impossible to honour, and amount to a cruel trick played on the most unhappy or frightened voters. Mr Trump says he can bully multinational companies to send jobs home. He pretends that illegal immigration can be ended with a border wall and mass deportations. Mr Trump claims that the obstacles to defeating Islamic terrorism are political correctness and squeamishness, proposing to keep America safe with a Muslim entry ban and torture for terrorists.

In living memory, Mr Cruz has rejected such bad ideas as mass deportations, noting in January that America is not “a police state”. He used to be a devoted free-trader. Alas, judging by his rhetoric on the election trail in Wisconsin this week, the Texan is choosing to stick to a narrower path. Trumpeting his second place in the three-man race for the Republican nomination, Mr Cruz calls himself the man to stop Mr Trump. But instead of denouncing Mr Trump’s false promises, the senator has moved to borrow them for himself. Like a snake-oil salesman stealing a rival’s label and slapping it on his own patent remedy, Mr Cruz now addresses himself to workers “with calluses on your hands” and vows to bring “millions upon millions” of highly paid jobs back from Mexico and China. He promises to spark an economic boom so rapid that young school-leavers will find themselves with “two, three, four, five job offers”. Listen carefully though, and the Cruz plan to unleash this miracle is the same that he has always offered: deep tax cuts skewed towards the rich, looser environmental rules and business regulations, the repeal of the Obamacare health law (to be replaced for low-income Americans with cheap but skimpy insurance). His stance on immigration has hardened: he now attacks legal immigration as a job-killer, too.

Addressing a crowd outside a suburban restaurant in Altoona, Mr Cruz rewrote the history of the Reagan era to omit all mention of its spiralling deficits, instead claiming that tax cuts and deregulation triggered an economic boom in the 1980s, funding a military build-up that led to Soviet defeat in the cold war. Mr Cruz promised to pull off a modern-day version of that Reagan miracle with a flat tax and by taking the “boot of the federal government off the neck of small business”. This, he says, would generate “trillions” of dollars in new revenues to fund the military firepower to defeat Islamic extremists. Worries about police states behind him, Mr Cruz now talks of patrolling Muslim neighbourhoods.

Campaigning in Wisconsin, Mr Cruz’s principal charge against Mr Trump is to cast the Republican front-runner as a phoney conservative who has donated to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats in the past, and to cast himself as a unifier. The audiences at Cruz events are not as united as they look, however. For one thing, nobody at the campaign stop in Altoona, or at a later rally in the smoke-stack town of Rothschild, bought the charge that Mr Trump—a man promising to torture terrorists and deport Mexicans—is a secret liberal. “I don’t think [Mr Trump] is a true conservative, but I think he will defend our country,” explained Carolyn Carlson in Altoona, summing up her presidential preferences as “Cruz first, Trump if necessary”. Most importantly, many Republicans explained that they had come to Mr Cruz only lately, after their favoured candidates had dropped out. They now long for the Texan to woo them. Lisa Nelson, a lobbyist, initially supported her local governor, Mr Walker, and the businesswoman Carly Fiorina. Now, she said, she wants to hear Mr Cruz become “less scary on social issues”. The Texan seems uninterested: his stump speech ends with a tribute to “Judaeo-Christian values”.

Gambling on Cleveland

A few in Altoona and in Rothschild praised the third-placed Republican contender, Governor John Kasich of Ohio, who is running as a voice of common-sense moderation, but sadly noted that he trails far behind. A striking number of voters at Cruz rallies in Wisconsin sound anxious and unhappy. “I honestly think that Trump might be more electable,” worried Pete Heineck, a factory worker from Wausau, speaking for many.

Some Republican grandees might languidly reply that angst among Cruz voters does not much matter—they are not endorsing the Texan because they want him to win. They just need him to deny Mr Trump the 1,237 delegates he must have to win the nomination outright, triggering a contested Republican National Convention in Cleveland at which party bosses dream of imposing a more palatable replacement. That is a big gamble. General-election voters currently see a Republican contest dominated by two men competing to offer the harshest, most divisive rhetoric. Mr Trump is a disgrace, but Mr Cruz is not the solution.