Plug and play Ted unplugged in Indiana

Plug and Play Ted got unplugged.

Ted Cruz makes much of what he calls his ground game. What Cruz did in Iowa and in Wisconsin, to his success, was to plug into the ground operation of one of the insiders. In Iowa it was Steve KIng, in Wisconsin it was Scott Walker. No surprise that Walker would have a strong grass roots effort in Wisconsin, including media, given his political career.

So Ted was good when he could plug his campaign into the state grassroots in the state he was going. He did not have that other places and he lost big-time. So he depended on that network to deliver success to his campaign.

However, Trump was not fortunate to have all that access and capability. Rather he just built it himself as he went. And Ted mocked Trump recently for parachuting into states like Mick Jagger and then leaving. But Donald turned out the vote, even in Michigan. His ground game is self-constructed

But now, or since Trump’s constant winning streak cannot be undone, Ted reverts to inside political chicanery. That’s right, the outsider Ted is playing inside-baseball politics. We’ve seen it all along. Then we hear Cruz drones say Donald just does not know how to play the game, or doesn’t understand the rules.

So Ted puts his faith, besides the primaries, into the delegate process and hopes for a contested election. Yesterday Jan Brewer criticized how she was shoved out of the delegate process. Now comes the story of Jim Gilmore.

Washington Post

Jim Gilmore may be a former governor, state attorney general, Republican National Committee chairman and presidential candidate. But he couldn’t get elected as a delegate to his party’s national convention.

When delegates were selected at Virginia’s state convention in Harrisonburg this past weekend, Gilmore, 66, put his name forward and was shut out.

The process was heavily politicized, as supporters of Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) maneuvered to elect a delegate slate that they hope will block billionaire Donald Trump from winning the Republican nomination for president.

While Trump won Virginia’s March 1 primary and garnered twice as many votes as third-place finisher Cruz, the party activists at the state convention picked 10 Cruz supporters and three Trump supporters to head to Cleveland.

Gilmore said he had been “informally assured” that he would be on the delegate slate — “that it was a no-brainer.”

But that was before the “strong-arm tactics at the convention” forced him out, he said.

More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/2016/05/02/61d0e896-107e-11e6-8967-7ac733c56f12_story.html

So Brewer was a one off that didn’t know what she was doing or talking about?

Gilmore has said he is interested in bringing Va into the Republican column and keeping it there. He admits that seems to be Trump. He will support the nominee and says we need to unify the party behind our nominee and beat Hillary. But even that is being undermined by Cruz. So for all the talk Cruz has about consolidating and unifying, he is a divider.

Now in Indiana, on the cusp of losing the Hoosier state, after counting on a win there, he recoils and unloads a diatribe on Trump and those supporting him. But he got Pence’s tepid endorsement, if you can call it that, late in the game where Pence said nice things about Trump as well. Then Came Ted’s scorched earth tirade of personal attack on Trump.

Does he really think this would help him on the verge of losing the primary? Apparently so, but then his back room delegate chicanery continues despite whatever he says publicly. Two faces of a campaign — the outsider pretender vs. the political operative grasping at any tactics he can — damn the unity talk.

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