by Ted Cruz
For example, Heidi and I became friends with George P. Bush, the grandson of George H. W. Bush, son of Jeb, and nephew of George W. I liked and admired “P,” as friends called him. Growing up in a famous family that had seen such tremendous success could cause anyone to be full of himself, but George P. was always well grounded and possessed a remarkable sense of humility. And, like me, he married up: his wife, Mandi, is beautiful, brilliant, down-to-earth, and charming.
During the attorney general campaign, George P. generously asked me if I would like to visit with his grandfather up in Kennebunkport, Maine, where the Bushes spent their summers. Of course I would.
On my way up from Texas, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to say to the former president. I did not know him at all. So I decided I wasn’t going to ask him for anything in my race. Instead I was just going to sit with him and solicit his advice—a novice, aspiring candidate looking for some wisdom from a longtime Texas politician and American statesman.
Meeting with him in his office, I was surprised by how much he already knew about my campaign and me. George P. had laid a lot of positive groundwork. After we talked for about twenty minutes, he asked, “So what time is your flight? Can you come out on the boat with Bar and me?”
I responded that my flight back to Texas was in two hours, but that flights could be changed quite easily. “Mr. President, I’ll stay as long as you’ll have me.”
He smiled and then scrutinized my attire—a suit and tie that I felt appropriate to the occasion. “Ted, that’s not going to do at all,” he said. The former president drove me in a golf cart to his residence, where he fished out some jeans, a shirt, and a belt, the buckle of which read, “President of the United States.” It was surreal to be wearing his clothes.
Then we met Mrs. Bush and went out on his boat. George Herbert Walker Bush was then eighty-four years old, but he drove that boat like he was still an eighteen-year-old Navy fighter pilot. He had the boat at full throttle, crashing into the waves, and spraying mist into our faces with unrestrained glee. Barbara sat in the front of the boat, with water pelting her face, and smiling as if nothing could make her happier.
We made our way down the Maine coast to a small restaurant where we dined on lobster rolls. On the way, we discussed the Green Revolution, which was just then playing out in Iran; we both were dismayed that President Obama was allowing to slip away this historic opportunity to support the democratic opposition to the virulently anti-American, theocratic rule of the Iranian mullahs.
At the end of our meal, we came back to the compound, where the former president had one more surprise in store. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a check from “George and Barbara Bush” in the amount of one thousand dollars and made out to the Ted Cruz for Attorney General campaign.
There have been few times in my life when I’ve been speechless—often to the great frustration of my critics. This, however, was one of those times. Eventually I stammered out a thank-you. I had to resist every urge to give the graying forty-first president a hug. I shook his hand, retrieved my rental car, and headed back to the airport, giddy that I had unexpectedly received the support of the patriarch of Texas’s most influential political family. I called Heidi and told her in wonderment, “I just had the most magical afternoon.”
After I flew back to Houston, my campaign followed up with the former president’s office to ask if he might be willing to give a formal endorsement to our campaign along with his contribution. His aides asked us to prepare a draft statement, which we did.
A couple of days later, I received a phone call from Karl Rove. Karl and I had always been friendly. When I was on the policy staff of the George W. Bush campaign, before Karl became a “master of the universe,” as he’s depicted in the media today, he was a charming, gregarious guy who would put members of the policy shop in headlocks and playfully dubbed us “the propeller heads.”
A couple of years earlier, I had sat down for a four-hour breakfast with Karl. I asked his advice on eventually running for office—whether I should stay on longer as solicitor general or go to private practice. Rove, an enthusiastic kibitzer on politics, generously shared his insights. He advised that I should stay on the job as solicitor general, keep building my record, and find opportunities to systematically build political support for a future run. It was good advice, and I tried hard to follow it.
Karl had found out about my meeting with George H. W. Bush and called me on the phone. He was irate, demanding, “What in the hell do you think you are doing?!”
It turned out Rove was in the process of helping raise money for the George W. Bush presidential library in Dallas. Texas donors were giving the Bushes tens of millions, including major donors who were supporting the Dallas state rep who wanted to run for attorney general. Those donors were now berating Karl.
“Well, Karl,” I responded, “I was just doing what you suggested when we met. Going out and getting support.”
“Yeah, well I didn’t think you were going to get support from 41,” he snapped. He suggested that the elder Bush was too old to have good judgment anymore. I was offended by that characterization, and knew from my visit with 41 that it wasn’t remotely true.
As Karl continued to yell at me, I responded calmly, “Look, I got my start in politics working for Bush 43 and for you. . . . What would you like me to do?”
“Return the check,” he said.
“Well, I can’t do that. We already deposited it.” I pointed out that under Texas’s election law, we had to list the contribution on our ethics disclosure report.
He paused for a few seconds. “All right, fine. Then I want you to do nothing whatsoever to draw attention to it.”
And then he pulled out the hammer. He implied that if I made any news about Bush 41’s support, then Bush 43 would endorse my opponent and come out publicly for him—a threat that was fairly striking given that I had devoted four years of my life to working as hard as I could helping to elect Bush and serving in his administration. I always wondered whether Karl had the authority to make these threats on behalf of the former president—he certainly acted like he did. In any event, the last thing I wanted to do in running a fledgling campaign in Texas was to get on the wrong side of Rove and the second President Bush.
“Fine,” I replied. “We’ll do nothing to draw attention to it.”
When I hung up the phone, I turned to Heidi, who’d been listening to the whole conversation. She was trembling, and visibly angry. At Karl. And at me, for caving in.
“You know what?” she said. “This is what’s screwed up about the Republican Party. Why the hell should the Republican nominee for attorney general in Texas depend not on their qualifications, but on who the donors are to the Bush presidential library?”
A couple of hours after my conversation with Rove, we received an email from Bush 41’s office. They had approved the draft endorsement we had sent, an unbelievably effusive statement from George and Barbara Bush calling me “the future of the Republican Party.” I was grateful yet again. It was difficult to imagine that Bush 41 was unaware of the consternation that his endorsement would cause Rove.
In any event, I called Jason and told him to take our draft press release announcing the endorsement and throw it in the trash. We then informed Bush 41’s office that I was immensely thankful for the support, that it meant so much to Heidi and to me, but we weren’t going to release a statement. We didn’t want to anger Karl or 43. The former president’s office said he understood.
Our campaign’s next hurdle was financial. We had to show that we could raise enough money to communicate with 26 million Texans. The only way to do that was to be able to afford statewide television ads. We set a goal for our first financial report to raise $1 million.
I spent the first six months of 2009 traveling the state, meeting with donors and asking for support. I didn’t attack the other well-known candidates considering entering the attorney general’s race; instead I su
ng their praises. They were friends whom I respected. But I also took the time to lay out why I believed I would do a better job.
When we met and exceeded our goal of $1 million, it sent shock waves across Texas. A political nobody had managed to pull what was widely considered a huge number.
We also launched a statewide leadership team that consisted of virtually every movement conservative leader in the state—people who had led grassroots groups. When I was solicitor general, we had fought side by side on many high-profile cases, such as defending the Ten Commandments and protecting U.S. sovereignty from the UN. Over time, these activists had come to know me and the sincerity of my beliefs.
As it happened, 2009 coincided with the first tea party rallies in Texas. The tea party was a true phenomenon of people fed up with politicians from both parties who’d raised our taxes, spent us into debt, and refused to listen to the voters who’d elected them. My father and I both spoke at some of the first rallies.
In Dallas, my dad told the crowd of more than ten thousand people that when he was a young man, he had seen a young, charismatic leader come to power promising hope and change, promising to redistribute the wealth. That man, of course, was Fidel Castro.
I posted a portion of my dad’s speech on Facebook, and one left-leaning journalist wrote a blog post saying it was ridiculous for anyone to compare Obama to Castro. Lefty commentators went nuts. As I was reading the comments late one night, I decided to comment myself on the blog. I signed in and made the following observation:
“To all the commentators hyperventilating over my Father’s speech, let me point something out—in his entire speech, he never once mentioned the words ‘Barack Obama.’ He simply described what Fidel Castro did in Cuba. Now . . . what does it say about you, that when you hear what Castro did, you immediately think it must be Obama?”
The unity of key conservative leaders in the state behind our campaign sent another shock wave through Texas politicos and journalists. And, over time, those developments began to suck the oxygen out of the race. As we’d hoped, one after another of the potential players looking at the race announced that they were not going to run. It now was clear that, in defiance of the odds and the professional political prognosticators, we were in an excellent position to win the attorney general’s race.
That’s when the floor fell out of our campaign.
In December 2009, Senator Hutchison announced that she wasn’t going to resign her Senate seat after all. At that point, it was already becoming clear that Hutchison was likely to lose her bid to unseat Governor Perry. Her decision to stay in Washington meant that the game of musical chairs wouldn’t happen. Everyone was stuck. Dewhurst could not run for Senate, meaning that Abbott could not run for lieutenant governor. When Abbott instead announced his campaign for reelection, I immediately ended my campaign and offered Abbott my enthusiastic support.
It was frustrating to have worked tirelessly for a year to build a formidable grassroots campaign, only to have the race disappear. But I hoped that our work would not be in vain. The following spring I sat down with Jason and John and spent several hours talking about the possibility that I might run instead for the U.S. Senate in 2012.
After her landslide loss for governor, Hutchison announced that she would serve out her Senate term, set to expire in 2012, but would not run for reelection. And the musical chairs began again.
On one level the idea that we might launch a campaign for the U.S. Senate was far crazier than my plan to run for attorney general. In fact it was audaciousness bordering on insanity. That wouldn’t be the last time people would say that about me.
The reason was that my likely opponent was David Dewhurst, the sitting lieutenant governor. In some states that might not be so bad, but in Texas, the lieutenant governor has long been called the most powerful elected official in the state. The reasons stem back to post–Civil War days, when carpetbagger governors ruled with an iron fist. After Reconstruction, Texas responded by adopting the Constitution of 1876, a document that deliberately created a very weak governorship in order to prevent any future gubernatorial dictators. That left the lieutenant governor with enormous influence.
The lieutenant governor presides over the Texas Senate, and wields power over that body not unlike the Speaker of the U.S. House. He can dictate which committees consider which bills, which bills in turn are considered on the floor of the senate, and (often) which bills pass and which fail. If my opponent were the lieutenant governor, there was no doubt that everybody—absolutely everybody—who had business before the Legislature would be against me. That meant every major donor, every major trade group, every corporation, and every lobbyist in the state. And just about every elected official. They had to support my opponent, or else risk a crippling retribution.
Moreover, the sitting lieutenant governor was no ordinary politician. Dewhurst, who had been in office for a decade, was immensely wealthy. To his credit, he had made his money himself, through a successful career in business. And he had demonstrated in past elections a willingness to spend vast sums from his $200 million fortune in order to guarantee a win. If he ran (and he was almost certain to run), we could expect our opponents to have resources far greater than whatever we could raise.
Dewhurst also had universal name recognition: 96 percent. Virtually every Republican primary voter knew his name and had voted for him before. In a state the size of Texas, name identification is a big, big deal, because building it is incredibly expensive.
There was also a sense that he was entitled to the seat. He was “next in line,” which in Republican primaries often matters a great deal.
Though I had gained some respect within Texas political circles from my attorney general bid, outside of those circles I was still unknown. Indeed, the first poll we conducted had us within the margin of error—not of David Dewhurst, but of zero. The name “Ted Cruz” registered the support of 2 percent of voters. The margin of error on the poll was 3 percent, which led Heidi to helpfully point out that, technically, my support might actually have been negative 1.
Early on in the Senate campaign, I sat down with Karl Rove once again, who’d cooled down considerably since yelling at me for courting George H. W. Bush.
Rove was never one to mince words. “Ted, you’re a fool,” he said. “You have no prayer of winning this race. Cannot be done.” Referring to the several other conservative candidates who were planning to challenge Dewhurst, he said, “You’ll be outraised by all of them.” At that point I laughed out loud. I said, “Karl, you may be right that we can’t beat Dewhurst, but I promise you you’re not right in that. If you believe that they’re going to outraise us, you’ve been out of Texas too long.”
In fact, it had been a long time since Karl had been seriously involved in Lone Star State politics. He had been casually advising Hutchison in her race against Governor Perry, which she’d lost by 20 points. But the bulk of his time was spent helping lead the super PAC Crossroads, which many saw as trying to get moderate Republicans elected across the country.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’re a fool because you’ve already won the AG race.” His point was that the attorney general position would be mine for the taking, when Greg Abbott stepped down from the post to become lieutenant governor after Dewhurst was elected to the Senate. “You’re blowing a sure thing and taking on an impossible race.”
I told him, “You know what, Karl? You’ve been incredibly successful politically. You could be an elder statesman and make a real difference for the party. You know perfectly well that what the party needs in Texas and nationally. You could actually stand up, Karl, and do the right thing.”
He just laughed and said, “Doesn’t matter, can’t be done. You don’t have a prayer.”
For a couple of decades, I’ve gone virtually every year to the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in Washington, D.C., a gathering of conservative and libertarian attorneys, judges, and law professors. I have many dear
old friends there. In November 2010, I made a new one.
At that particular lawyers convention, a newly elected senator named Mike Lee was in attendance. A Utah conservative who successfully challenged his state’s incumbent Republican senator, Mike is the son of Rex Lee, a Reagan-era solicitor general who is widely considered one of the finest U.S. Supreme Court advocates in history. Mike followed in his dad’s footsteps by excelling as a lawyer in a career that included a clerkship for Justice Sam Alito at the U.S. Supreme Court.
I ended up spending about three hours visiting with Mike. We went together from the convention in the Mayflower Hotel back to the Capitol. He was still down in the basement with temporary offices, and we walked the Capitol hallways talking for hours about legal issues, constitutional issues, and the challenges facing our country. We found ourselves agreeing on almost every topic we could come up with. I remember being struck that at some point he mentioned a recent study that had shown the massive value of the land owned by the federal government.
Only 13 percent of that land is federal parks. Most of the rest is in the American West, where states were forced to hand over a significant portion of their land as a condition of joining the Union. In Nevada, for example the federal government owns nearly 90 percent of the land. This makes no sense. Parks are wonderful—and we need to preserve and improve them—but there is no reason for the federal government to own huge portions of any state. Nationwide, much of this land sits unused, while small parts of it are leased out for grazing or private use. Mike pointed out to me that the value of all that federal land was roughly $14 trillion.
At the time, the national debt also happened to be $14 trillion. That suggested to us an obvious and rather elegant solution for eliminating the debt and moving as much land as possible—other than national parks—into private hands.