It's as if they were waiting, breathlessly. The moment Ted Cruz announced his presidential campaign, the national media proclaimed their horror. He was "brash," a "hardliner," an "uncompromising conservative," they warned. ABC anchor David Muir announced his agenda was the usual No list: "Promising no abortion, no gay marriage, no gun control, no IRS."
Apparently, there's no room for hope and change -- if you're a conservative.
Barack Obama owned the most left-wing voting record during his short tenure in the Senate. But when he announced his presidential campaign in Springfield, Illinois, on Feb. 10, 2007 -- arrogantly comparing himself to Abe Lincoln -- the networks warmly repeated that he pledged to be a "uniter" that was "promising a more hopeful America." They said he declared it was "time for his generation to end the cynical partisan politics of the baby boomers."
How does that look in 2015? National Review's Jim Geraghty points out that Obama "the Uniter" nudged Vice President Biden and 58 congressional Democrats into boycotting an address from the Israeli prime minister, and now insists on secret deals with Iran with no congressional intervention. His team just announced plans to withhold federal emergency funds from governors who are "climate deniers." They put up barricades around open-air monuments during government shutdowns. Obama mocked his opponents as "tea baggers." The examples of class, gender and race warfare are endless.
But Ted Cruz is unacceptable because he won't compromise.
An unsigned staff editorial in The Washington Post is steeped in denial, if not intellectual obfuscation, ignoring the governing reality of Obama, the uncompromising wacko bird. They acknowledged some similarities -- short tenure in the Senate, cute daughters, charisma and alleged constitutional expertise. And then they launched into Cruz by projecting untruths about Obama.
"Here's one way to tell Mr. Cruz from the winning constitutional scholar of 2008: Sen. Barack Obama promised to unite the country. Mr. Cruz -- not so much. In fact, the most notable characteristic of Mr. Cruz's brief time in elected politics has been his aversion to values that are essential to democracy's functioning: practicality, modesty and compromise."
That's the President Obama of 2015: Compromise? Modesty? Pragmatism? Or consider candidate Obama, who dropped his pal Reverend Wright from praying at his campaign kickoff at the last minute. He dropped wearing a flag pin for a while in 2007. In 2008, Obama mocked the "bitter clingers" who revere gun rights and religion.
The Post writers plowed ahead shamelessly. Check out this flagrant display of denial about Obama's betrayal of his promises to be uniter in chief.
"It has been more than a decade since Mr. Obama derided 'the pundits' who 'like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states.' If those divisions have proven less mutable than he predicted, the answer is not to give up on progress," the Post proclaimed. We need "leaders who understand that progress and principle can go hand in hand, and who have the pragmatic skills to make that happen."
But the Post wasn't done insulting the senator from Texas. "Mr. Cruz's unique contribution -- if one can call it that -- has been his confrontational, ideology-driven style and tactics, marked by a refusal to compromise even when that leads to national dysfunction and embarrassment."
The Posties actually choked on Cruz saying, "We demand our liberty." They insisted the country "needs to take its political disagreements down a notch."
This is where the Post agenda becomes clear. Liberals (including journalists) don't want compromise. They want conservative surrender. They certainly don't want embarrassing "extremists" demanding "liberty," as if that was some sort of antiquated notion rejected by the enlightened.
It was The Washington Post that years ago gave us the "poor, uneducated and easy to command types" descriptor for conservatives. Years later, nothing's changed.