Texas Senator and Joe McCarthy reincarnate Ted Cruz announced on Twitter shortly after midnight he's officially running for the GOP U.S. Presidential nomination.
He spoke about his bid at Liberty University (yes, the one founded by Jerry Falwell) later today. We hope nobody brings small children.
Cruz is a freshman senator who was elected to his seat in 2012, and is also the first to definitively announce his presidential run. He'll obviously have some stiff competition from the likes of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and a few other people who deny climate change and think it's perfectly okay to discriminate against The Gays.
Of all of them, Cruz may actually be the most far to the right, prompting a Barry Goldwater comparison from CNN. (Ick!) That obviously gives him an edge over the primary season, when it comes to squaring off against Bush, who seems to be getting a pass as a moderate for some reason.
Cruz's handlers seem to have forgotten to buy up the domain names tedcruz.com and tedcruzforamerica.com. Hilariously, someone else beat them to it.
Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to still be rallying around Hillary Clinton because that's what Democrats do these days when a somewhat popular moderate expresses interest in being a punching bag for the Koch Brothers for a few months.
Another possible Democratic candidate anointment could happen in Florida as Jupiter-area U.S. Rep Patrick Murphy announces his bid for the U.S. Senate in 2016.
Murphy managed to beat controversial tea party Congressman Allen West, which probably wasn't that hard since West is kind of a nutter.
Murphy would be running for what would presumably be an open Senate seat, assuming Rubio vacates it to run for president.
The candidate roster for that seat is large (though you can count Charlie Crist and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz out) for both major parties. Political observers on the Internets, well, progressive Democratic ones anyway, have said a primary between Murphy, a moderate, and Orlando-area U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, an outspoken progressive, would be a fight for the "soul" of the Democratic Party in Florida. After all, there is kind of a tendency here to run un-exciting candidates that seem to have broad, if a little tepid, appeal instead of candidates that excite the party's base. (See: Crist vs. Nan Rich, 2014).
Going balls-to-the-wall seems to have worked out well for the opposition, guys.
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2015.