If Ted Cruz has his druthers, when future generations refer to The Speech, they will be talking not about Ronald Reagan’s attempt to rescue the Goldwater campaign in 1964 but about the high-wire act that the Texas senator pulled off at the Republican National Convention this year.
Cruz may be hated by his colleagues, but he understands the theater of politics and has always been able to light up a crowd. He wasn’t trying to do that in Cleveland when he refused to endorse the Republican nominee, Donald Trump. The boos and jeers that he elicited from delegates on the convention floor by declaring the fight this year is “not for one particular candidate or campaign” and urging Americans to “vote your conscience” added drama to the occasion and gave it a sense of historical import. The historian Richard Norton Smith characterized Nelson Rockefeller’s denunciation of Goldwater at the convention in San Francisco as “one of those rare moments in history when a page is visibly being turned.” So it was when Cruz walked off the convention stage in July.
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