Ted Cruz Met With ‘New York Values,’ Heckled In The Bronx
Ted Cruz found out just how valued his opinion of “New York values” actually is with the people of the Bronx borough this week as his campaign landed in America’s largest city in hopes of drumming up support for his bid for the Republican nomination for president. Citizens of the Bronx were quick to let the Texas senator know how they felt about his anti-immigration policies. And it wasn’t just the average New Yorker that told Ted Cruz what they thought. The city’s politicians and a tabloid weighed in as well.
As Fox News Latino reported on April 7, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) arrived in New York this week to begin mustering support in an effort to score points against Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and perhaps pull off a surprise win in the upcoming New York primary on April 19. But in a walk-through in the Bronx, a historically immigrant-dominated section of the city, and a stop at Sabrosura restaurant, he was met with protesters shouting that he should “get out of the Bronx.”
“You’re running on an anti-immigrant platform, and you’re speaking in the Bronx,” one demonstrator told him, according to the New York Daily News. “You should not be here.”
But Cruz seemed to not be phased by the heckling. His reply, even after one protester was forcibly ejected from the campaign stop, was a short “happy to be here.”
Admittedly, Cruz had an unlikely road to victory in the New York Republican Primary long before he made the now much-repeated and much-criticized comments about Trump and his “New York values,” which, needless to say, did not go over well in the city or the state at the time — and time only allowed the comment to fester and grow ever more offensive to New Yorkers. With his chief rival, real estate mogul Donald Trump, a native son of New York (born in Queens, another of New York City’s five boroughs), his work had been doubly cut out for him.
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As Bill O’Reilly noted on the “Talking Points Memo” portion of his Fox News Channel show The O’Reilly Factor on Wednesday night, Donald Trump’s poll numbers were still exceeding 50 percent in the state as the candidates began their last-minute attempts to secure more votes for the primary. To get Trump below that 50 percent vote total, O’Reilly pointed out that “as in any state New Yorkers are sensitive, so the senator has to overcome his initial New York values comments.” And he noted that Donald Trump was using those comments, which were stated again and again but made national headlines after a Republican debate in January, to great advantage in attack ads against Cruz.
O’Reilly, disclaiming that he himself is a native New Yorker, admitted that the city was a bit different than other large cities, but where it broke left in politics, the rest of the state tended to lean conservative. And yet, the “bottom line” was that Ted Cruz has “got a lot of hard work to do” to get Donald Trump below that fifty percent poll number.
And his first few days in New York City showed he wasn’t all that welcome. Not just by the people of the Bronx, but by the city’s most popular tabloid and local politicians as well. The New York Daily News made headlines across the nation by emblazoning on their cover, “Take The F U Train, Ted!”
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Peter King, the outspoken Republican congressman who represents New York’s 22nd Congressional District (which is made up of a section of Long Island), told the Daily News that any New Yorker thinking of voting for “phony” Ted Cruz “should have their head examined.” Later, in an interview with Fox Business News, he said anyone supporting the Texas senator was “nuts” and if Cruz was the eventual Republican nominee for president, he would “get some cyanide.”
At present, Ted Cruz trails Donald Trump, as tracked by Politico, in the primary (and caucus) delegate count, 743 to 532. The goal to win the Republican nomination on the first ballot at the convention in Cleveland is 1,237 delegates. New York has 95 delegates up for grabs, with the winner of the primary taking most of the delegates.
[Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images]
