Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
From “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
RICHMOND — Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II made scant reference to the federal shutdown and said nothing at all about Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) on Saturday, when the two Republicans both addressed a conservative group.
But Cuccinelli, the GOP nominee for governor, met privately with Cruz before the event and urged him to find a solution to the shutdown, his campaign said.
Democrats have pounded Cuccinelli all week over his plans to appear at a Family Foundation dinner headlined by Cruz, widely considered the architect of the shutdown as a means of defunding the Affordable Care Act. Cuccinelli has said repeatedly that he disagrees with the tactic despite his fierce opposition the federal health-care law known informally as Obamacare.
The impasse in Washington has forced Cuccinelli to walk a fine line: between his longtime tea party supporters, who regard Cruz as a hero, and independent voters in a state with a large federal workforce, who tend to take a dim view of Obamacare but an even dimmer one of the shutdown.
Cuccinelli has to understand that he can’t have it both ways. He cannot be a far right tea party republican and at the same time be a faux moderate. The two ideas are mutually exclusive. His attempts to edge, albeit slightly, towards the center have not been particularly successful, especially with the McAuliffe people breathing down his neck. They aren’t going to allow him or the Virginia voters to forget Cuccinelli’s more outrageous stunts, that were aimed at pleasing his base and earning him street cred as being the quintessential culture warrior.
On the other hand, Cuccinelli profits from comparison to Ted Cruz, who many people to the left of far right, feel is missing a few oars in the water.
As for Cruz, he called Cuccinelli a “principled constitutional warrior.”
“Let me say for a second how proud I am of my friend Ken Cuccinelli,” Cruz said. “Ken is smart. He’s principled. And he’s fearless. And that last characteristic in particular is a rare, rare commodity in elected life.”
Cruz did the Cooch no favors. Cruz is quite an albatross to be hanging around the attorney general’s neck. Cuccinelli needs to run for dear life!
Obviously, that albatross is also pulling him down in the polls.
It sure sounds like it.
This quote also is hurting him. I truly wish he would deny it.
“It is worse than our immigration policy,” Cuccinelli said in an interview in 2012. “You can’t break up rat families … and you can’t even kill ’em.”
He was speaking of the pest problem in C.