A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America by Cruz Ted

Author:Cruz, Ted [Cruz, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Political candidates, Political
ISBN: 9780062365613
Amazon: 0062365614
Publisher: Broadside Books
Published: 2015-06-29T05:00:00+00:00

In 2009, Texas politicos were undergoing their unique version of musical chairs. U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison had stated that she intended to resign her Senate seat and run for governor against the Republican incumbent, Rick Perry. David Dewhurst, the lieutenant governor, in turn planned to run for Hutchison’s open Senate seat, which left Attorney General Greg Abbott free to run for Dewhurst’s seat as lieutenant governor. I decided to campaign for attorney general, to replace my former boss, and I declared my candidacy for the post in January 2009.

At the time, there were four serious Republicans looking at the attorney general’s race, five if you included myself as a serious candidate—which most Texas observers did not. I could understand why. I had never been elected to any political office. I’d never even run a campaign. I had zero statewide name recognition. Indeed, as I often joked, the last elected office I had held was on student council.

My likely opponents included two state supreme court justices (both already elected statewide), a member of Congress personally worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and a state representative who represented and was beloved by the biggest donors in Dallas.

If I had any hope of winning, we had to do something that had never been done before—build a massive grassroots army to overcome the money and vested interests across the state.

My first task was assembling a team. The very first person who joined me was my political consultant, a young man named Jason Johnson. Jason had some of the characteristics of a Republican James Carville—though I doubt either one would appreciate the comparison.

Jason came from modest circumstances in rural East Texas. When I made reference to the fact that he’d grown up in a double-wide trailer, he feigned offense—because his trailer wasn’t double-wide. Those, he said, belonged to the rich people in town.

I first met Jason when he was Greg Abbott’s top political strategist. At the time, he had run nearly 70 campaigns in Texas and had won all but two of them. He has a deep, analytical sense for politics and an instinctive sense about people—two priceless qualities in a political strategist. The New York Times once described him as “a scrappy East Texan” with “a touch of mad genius.” That led me to give him the nickname “Touch of Genius.”

Having forged a well-deserved reputation as a top political consultant, Jason could have worked for any of the candidates considering the race. Indeed, conventional wisdom was that the right thing for him to do was to sign on with one of the candidates with unlimited financial resources, who could compensate him richly for his services. Jason decided to come with me instead. We knew each other well, and he cared a good deal that the next attorney general, like Greg Abbott, would be a principled conservative who would stand and fight for the causes we believed in. My hiring of Jason was the first signal to Texas politicos that I was serious about the race.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.