Texas Sen. Ted Cruz heaped effusive praise on South Carolina Tuesday night during a conference call with college Republicans, promising to return to the early presidential primary state soon.
Cruz spoke for just under 20 minutes and answered a final question about his future political aspirations by pointing to his experience in the Palmetto State during the 2000 presidential campaign.
Here’s how he fielded the query:
“You will not be surprised to know I’m a huge fan of South Carolina, and in fact, I think back to the 2000 Bush campaign, when I was working on the campaign, on the policy team. I spent the entire week of that South Carolina campaign on the road with George W. Bush traveling the state. And if you’ll remember, in that particular race, Bush had won Iowa and then John McCain had won New Hampshire and won it by 19 points, kicked the Bush team in and the campaign was shellshocked. And I’ll tell you, South Carolina was do or die. If George W. Bush would’ve lost South Carolina, he would not have been elected president. I was on the bus with him in South Carolina all week going from event to event to event and one of the things that struck me then and has struck me since then is how similar South Carolinians are to Texans. I think that our states are blessed to share very similar values. South Carolinians and Texans are both friendly, are good people, they’re God-fearing, we believe in the 2nd amendment, we believe in individual liberty and we’ve got a strong patriotic passion for America. And George W. Bush won South Carolina and went on to win the election. That was truly inspirational.”
“I’m a big believer in the old adage that good policy is good politics, that if you stand up and do the right thing, if you do the principled thing, then the political benefits flow from it. But if you don’t worry about the politics, you just focus on doing the right thing and empowering the people, then that’s how you actually turn this country around . . . I expect and hope to be back in South Carolina soon.”
Earlier in the call, in answering a question about how college Republicans could do more to convince other student to join the GOP cause, Cruz tipped his cap to the father of potential 2016 rival Sen. Rand Paul.
“The two Republican politicians in the last 50 years who most inspired young people, I think they were hands down, Ronald Reagan and Ron Paul. And what’s quite striking about that is both of them were septuagenarians, both of them were in their seventies when they did that, they were not young James Dean characters. But what did Ronald Reagan, what did Ron Paul do? They stood for principle and they fought passionately for those principles in a way that inspired.”
South Carolina College GOP chairman Taylor Mason, who organized the call, called Cruz “a vital part of the grassroots movement that is taking the fight to Washington.” His group dispatched 250 students to volunteer on political races in 2013.
Follow Dave’s blog at TheRun2016.com
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