Ted Cruz won the Wyoming primary yesterday, and is now within 90 delegates of Donald Trump. On Friday, Cruz joined Sean Hannity to talk about the importance of cutting government. The conversation immediately shifted to Donald Trump, and Cruz let loose. As RedState notes:
HANNITY: How do you get Washington to spend less. I’ve always liked the “penny plan.” Because it’s simple. You cut one cent of of each dollar for six years and you get to a balanced budget. But that’s part of it. What would you do?
CRUZ: The only way you can do it with, one, strong conservative leadership in the White House backed up by the people. You know, one of the striking things last night, in the entire course of the debate it became very evident that Donald Trump has no solutions to any of these problems.
HANNITY: [unintelligible] But I think the question most Americans want to know is how do you get to a balanced budget. But…eliminate baseline budgeting…
CRUZ: All of that matters but the most import piece, if you want to turn around the deficit and the debt, is economic growth. If we stay at 1 and 2 percent economic growth…
HANNITY: …can’t do it…
CRUZ: …the math doesn’t work. You can’t cut enough and Donald, at the end of the day, doesn’t understand where growth comes from. Because Donld, he’s said a lot of times, you know, nobody knows the system better than he does. And he may well be right. Because Donald is the system, he is Washington, and notice his perspective, Donald’s perspective is government is the answer to everything. That whatever the problem is, we need more government. And to every issue he doesn’t really disagree with Hillary and Obama on substance, he just says they’re not doing a good enough job, he’ll negotiate a better deal with socialize health care and ObamaCare. And here’s the key, if you want economic growth you know two words that never come out of Donald’s mouth: small business. Because to Donald’s perspective the economy is about giant corporations, New York billionaires, sitting down with politicians, whether it’s Hillary Clinton or John Boehner and suckling off government and getting rich at the expense of the working men and women. Listen, to heck with big business. The focus of growth has got to be small business.
Cruz’s tactic- of asking Trump for specific policy proposals and getting him to articulate specifics seems to be the most effective strategy offered so far.