What Ted Cruz Values: The Texan Is Repelling Millions Who Believe in an America of the Future, Not the Past

I

t’s 70 degrees in this desert oasis, where I’m attending a writers’ festival, and I’m looking up at a vista of snowcapped peaks, cerulean skies and pink clouds that looks like a Bob Ross painting, only happier. But there’s only so much California positivity a man can handle, especially when he doesn’t play golf. That snowbound den of depravity known as Manhattan is calling me home.

With apologies to Billy Joel, I’m in a New York values state of mind.

Maybe I’d be a better person if I got away from the coasts more often, or visited a gun range. Maybe my conservative principles would be less attenuated if I weren’t surrounded, as Ted Cruz put it the other day, by people who “are socially liberal or pro-abortion or pro-gay marriage,” and “focus around money and the media.” Maybe I should start listening to country music, the way Mr. Cruz did after he decided, in good Soviet fashion, that his musical taste ought to be dictated by political considerations.

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