Desperation in his race against an unexpectedly tough competitor has pushed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to put up a few reminders of why most of his fellow senators loathe him and voters should, too. Voters were outraged to get a mailer from Cruz’s Senate campaign made to look like a court summons, and he’s continuing his over-the-top efforts to paint lifelong Texan Beto O’Rourke as some kind of bizarre cultural enemy to all that Texans hold dear.
The shady “summons” mailers are, the New York Times reports, legal. But that doesn’t mean they’re right. They say “SUMMONS ENCLOSED—OPEN IMMEDIATELY” in big letters, and in the spot on the envelope where you would normally see a return address, they say “Official Travis County Summons, Voter Enrollment Campaign Division, Ted Cruz for Senate 2018,” though elsewhere there is an actual return address to the Cruz campaign. According to a voter who received one of the mailers, addressed to his recently deceased grandmother, “My grandmother was facing cognitive decline at the end of her life and I think if she’d read this she might have been deceived by it.”
The summons is an echo of mailers alleging “voting violations” sent by Cruz’s presidential campaign in Iowa going into that state’s influential caucuses. Because when basically everyone who knows you hates you, scaring people is your last best move.
This wasn’t Cruz’s only recent attempt to scare voters into supporting him, though. At a South Texas campaign event, Cruz responded to the appearance of PETA members outside his event by joking-not-joking that O’Rourke would … ban barbecue.
“When I got here someone told me that even PETA was protesting and giving out barbecued tofu, so I got to say, they summed up the entire election: If Texas elects a Democrat, they’re going to ban barbecue across the state of Texas.”
“You want to talk about an issue to mobilize the people, and I’m talking everybody,” Cruz said to appreciative laughter. “So I want to thank PETA and I do want to tell PETA you’re going to have to disclose to the FEC that by coming and protesting and giving away tofu, that you have given an in-kind contribution to my campaign by demonstrating just how bad things can get.”
PETA was there with the tofu because of Cruz’s previous attack on O’Rourke as supported by donors who “want us to be just like California, right down to tofu and silicon and dyed hair,” which followed an earlier attack on O’Rourke as a “triple meat Whataburger who is out of touch with Texas values.” Meat is definitely a key theme of the Cruz campaign at this point, and it feels like the notoriously weird, unappealing Cruz is trying to use meat humor to make himself seem down to earth and approachable. But at this point it’s just bizarre, a strained series of efforts to surmount Cruz’s obvious personality deficit vs. O’Rourke by making jokes about one of the items on a Texas culture crib sheet. Like, Cruz is looking down at the list of “normal Texas person” things scribbled on his hand and all he can make his eyes focus on is the word “meat,” so that’s what he’s talking about.
O’Rourke should challenge him to a barbecue-eating competition. Maybe even issue him a summons.
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