Cruz launches White House bid, calls for better Israel ties

WASHINGTON (AP) — Texas Senator Ted Cruz, one of the Republican Party’s most conservative members, launched his presidential campaign Monday in a crammed auditorium at America’s biggest Christian university, becoming the first among what’s expected to be a crowded field of White House hopefuls to officially enter the race.

In his speech, the Harvard Law School graduate spoke of the promise of America, saying, “we demand our liberty.”

And he laid out positions antithetical to most Democrats, including the repeal of President Barack Obama’s overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

“Imagine in 2017 a new president signing a law the repeals every word of Obamacare,” Cruz said to a cheering crowd.

He drew especially loud applause when he was critical of Obama’s difficult relations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Instead of a president who boycotts Prime Minister Netanyahu, imagine a president who stands unapologetically with Israel,” Cruz proclaimed, referencing the frayed relationship between Obama and the Israeli leader.

He also called for the abolishment of the tax collecting Internal Revenue Service, a flat tax, making abortion illegal, gun rights, and a host of other issues that put him deep in the conservative wing of the Republican party and its small-government, low-tax tea party wing.

Cruz, 44, touted his family’s story as the embodiment of the American dream of overcoming adversity to reach success. He is the child of an American mother and a father who fled Cuba in 1957. When Cruz was three years old, his father left him and his mother in Canada, where he was born. His father, now an evangelical preacher, went back to the United States where he eventually found a deep Christian faith, returned to his wife and child and brought them to the US.

Elected to the Senate in 2012, Cruz quickly established himself as an uncompromising conservative willing to take on Democrats and fellow Republicans alike. At times he has been scorned by leading members of his own party, with fellow senator and former presidential candidate John McCain once labeling him a “wacko bird.”

Cruz’s popularity within the right-wing base could give him shine in the primary, a state-by-state process dominated by the most conservative Republican voters. But his tense relationship with the Republican Party establishment complicates his path to the nomination. And if he makes it to the general election, he would have a hard time winning over moderates and independents.

Cruz will not be the only official 2016 candidate for long.

Several other Republicans are expected to enter the race in the coming weeks, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and two Senate colleagues, Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Florida’s Marco Rubio.

None is considered a heavy favorite, though Bush, the son and brother of two former presidents, had been getting the most attention in recent weeks as he takes aggressive steps toward launching his candidacy.

Whoever wins the Republican nomination would likely face former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nod who is expected to soon launch her campaign.

Cruz won praise from conservative tea party activists in 2013 for leading a 16-day government shutdown in an unsuccessful drive to repeal the health law, a key achievement of the Obama presidency.

On foreign policy, Cruz was among 47 Republican senators who signed a letter to Iran’s supreme leader warning that any nuclear deal that is struck with the Obama administration and five other world powers could become null and void after the 2016 election when the current president leaves the White House.

He also opposed Obama’s executive action to ease deportations of millions of immigrants in the US. illegally and to the White House opening to communist Cuba, his father’s homeland.

Cruz announced his candidacy on Twitter just after midnight, several hours before the official launch at Liberty University, the Virginia college founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. The setting indicates Cruz plans an aggressive courtship of cultural conservatives and young voters.

While the senator was born in Canada, but two lawyers who represented presidents from both parties at the Supreme Court recently wrote in the Harvard Law Review that Cruz meets the constitutional requirement to run.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.