Yes, it’s time for Ted Cruz to start his run on the Death Star thermal exhaust port 
 
 posted at 6:31 pm on March 22, 2015 by Jazz Shaw 
 
 It’s the worst kept secret in politics this weekend. Of course, when you’ve been in the eye of the media for more than a year as a possible POTUS candidate and you suddenly summon the Beltway paparazzi to your secret fortress at Liberty University on a Monday, it was going to be a tough cat to keep in the bag. Unless this is a stunt and the media elite have entirely missed the boat, Ted Cruz will skip the exploratory committee process entirely and announce his run for the White House tomorrow. 
 
 Sen. Ted Cruz plans to announce Monday that he will run for president of the United States, accelerating his already rapid three-year rise from a tea party insurgent in Texas into a divisive political force in Washington. Cruz will launch a presidential bid outright rather than form an exploratory committee, said senior advisers with direct knowledge of his plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because an official announcement had not been made yet. They say he is done exploring and is now ready to become the first Republican presidential candidate. The senator is scheduled to speak Monday at a convocation ceremony at Liberty University in Virginia, where he is expected to declare his campaign for the presidency. 
 
 Before getting into this, the media spokesmodels may want to double check their figures one more time on this story. As it turns out, Cruz will be the second GOP candidate to announce. A careful reading of the news will show that Mark Everson announced his presidential bid on March 5th. Some of you may have missed that because you were busy saying, “Mark who?” But he was the IRS commissioner during part of George W. Bush’s term in office and he is officially in the race. (Before you object, I’m not counting Vermin Supreme. If he wins I will heartily apologize.) 
 
 But back to Senator Cruz. Watching the Sunday shows today I saw the most amusing set of reactions imaginable to this story. Some of them took the usual slant of describing Cruz as divisive or controversial or any other number of adjectives meant to paint him into the corner of the fringe. Questions abounded regarding why he should do it now. Why didn’t he wait longer? Why didn’t he do it sooner? (Yes, I heard both of those in the same thirty minute block.) 
 
 To be completely honest here, I spent quite a while last year thinking that Cruz was below dark horse status and probably wouldn’t even run. If he did, I assumed that he would be one of the “flavor of the month” candidates who would be pushed aside by a flood of establishment money or simply collapse under the weight of unforced errors. But the last few months have had me thinking differently. Cruz is nearly unshakable on the podium and gracious in interviews with even the most hostile press members. I’ve seriously yet to see him be put much off his game. 
 
 But why now? There’s an excellent reason. We have a parade of the expected, “legitimate” candidates who are waiting in the wings. (You can see up to twenty of them here in varying degrees of probability.) At least the top ten of them are people all of the donors are supposed to support. It’s who we expected to see all along. And there will be the usual circus of media events as each of them announces, with the usual traps of gotcha questions and ghosts from the past. But for the moment, nobody else among the big names has moved their first piece on the board. This will give the media the perfect opportunity to open up with both barrels and hit Cruz with everything they’ve got. (Insert your own “Cruz Missiles” joke here.) 
 
 From what I’ve seen thus far, Ted will probably shake them off. If there was a huge scandal waiting to be revealed we’d have seen it by now, so they’ll want to see him stumble under intense questioning. As I mentioned above, I’m beginning to suspect that it won’t happen. And if it doesn’t, the wavering donors who aren’t feeling all that comfortable about Jeb, Christie or Walker may see a new place to invest. That’s the kind of tectonic shift Cruz will need to bump his poll numbers up out of the single digits. And once that happens, all bets are off. 
 
 Ted Cruz needs a trial by fire under everything the media will throw at him. It was coming anyway, so why not do it before the rest of the show ponies come into the ring? The timing of this announcement may turn out to be a master stroke. 
 
 Related Posts: ||||| The 2016 election officially began with a tweet. 
 
 Shortly after midnight on Monday morning, Ted Cruz confirmed on Twitter that he will run for president, making him the first official candidate of the 2016 race and kicking off a season of campaign launches, with several other candidates expected to jump in in coming weeks. 
 
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 “I’m running for President and I hope to earn your support!” the tweet read, with a link to a slickly-produced 30-second campaign video. 
 
 “It’s a time for truth,” Cruz says in the clip, which is paid for by “Cruz for President.” “A time to rise to the challenge, just as Americans have always done. I believe in America and her people, and I believe we can stand up and restore our promise. It’s going to take a new generation of courageous conservatives to help make America great again. And I’m ready to stand with you to lead the fight.” 
 
 A full announcement is scheduled for Monday morning around 10 A.M., two advisers confirmed, when the Texas Republican and his family are expected to unveil the campaign at Liberty University, a conservative Christian college in Lynchburg, Va. The Associated Press photographed the Cruz family’s walk-through on Sunday, complete with a spousal kiss on stage. 
 
 Cruz, a tea party-aligned Republican who was elected to the Senate in 2012, will become the first formally announced candidate of the presidential campaign. Over the next few weeks, nearly 10 months before the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, he will be joined by several other candidates — including Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky on the GOP side, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side — who are also expected to kick off their campaigns. 
 
 An early April launch allows them to take advantage of the full second fundraising quarter to rack up their cash figures as part of an attempt to project campaign strength after the June 30 filing deadline. 
 
 Cruz’s announcement comes with the Senate still in session. With a two-week recess scheduled to begin the following week and run through April 10, that window has created an incentive for candidates in federal office to formally announce. Cruz, by launching Monday, will get a head start on Paul, who is expected to announce in Louisville, Ky., on April 7, before embarking on a four-state tour the day after, with stops in New Hampshire, Charleston, S.C., Iowa City and Las Vegas. Paul’s campaign also confirmed a speech in Mount Pleasant, S.C., on the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier. 
 
 Rubio’s camp is also looking at the same time frame. 
 
 Clinton, the presumptive Democratic frontrunner, is preparing for an April launch while working to finalize a broad slate of hires for the expected Brooklyn campaign headquarters and in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. 
 
 Her schedule contains no public events after this week, ratcheting up speculation that she will officially announce her bid around the beginning of next month. As Cruz rolls out his campaign, she will be in Washington at the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, for an event co-hosted by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union that’s designed to highlight her ties to organized labor. 
 
 Cruz, 44, will bypass the traditional exploratory phase of the campaign — reflecting a calculation that there’s little point in prolonging the process and that in being first out of the gate he can draw greater attention. The news of the announcement was first reported by the Houston Chronicle on Sunday. 
 
 By Sunday night, TedCruz.org was live as the senator’s presidential campaign site. The campaign failed to secure TedCruz.com, which features a pro-Obama message. 
 
 By starting early, Cruz, a grassroots favorite, could crowd out the half-a-dozen other potential candidates who will be playing for the most conservative segment of the GOP base. Those likely opponents, such as Ben Carson and Rick Santorum, aren’t planning to announce until later in the spring. Yet Cruz could also be opening himself up as a target to other potential rivals, some of whom already haven’t shied away from criticizing him. Likely candidates such as Santorum, Rick Perry and Lindsey Graham have all publicly jabbed him in the past, even before he was officially running. 
 
 Cruz is likely to face stiff headwinds in the Republican primary, with many of the party’s biggest donors throwing their support to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and many of the party’s conservative voters getting behind Paul and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. 
 
 His own colleagues in Washington have frequently been disdainful of Cruz since he helped instigate the 2013 government shutdown. And his hardline views and uncompromising style have disqualified him even in the eyes of more conservative elements of the political class who are concerned about electability. 
 
 Ted Cruz ad: 'Ted Cruz for President' 
 
 But Cruz is embracing that outsider status, just as he did in Texas, where in 2012 he beat out the presumed Republican Senate nominee, former Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, and became a hero to that conservative state’s tea party. He frequently compares the 2016 election dynamics to those of 1980 —the year Ronald Reagan was elected. 
 
 “In 1980, Washington, D.C., despised Ronald Reagan,” he said at the Texas GOP convention last summer, an implicit nod to his own standing, and a theme he has returned to as recently as at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year. “The only way we turn this country around is the American people.” 
 
 Cruz also relishes his reputation as an uncompromising conservative — in his campaign launch video, he refers to himself as a “courageous conservative.” In his view, the GOP has lost the last two presidential elections because the party has nominated candidates who are too moderate. 
 
 “If we nominate another candidate in that same mold, the same voters who stayed home in 2008 and 2012 will stay home in 2016, and Hillary Clinton is the next president,” he told POLITICO in December, after Jeb Bush announced he was considering a presidential bid. 
 
 In starting his campaign at Liberty University, a private Christian college founded in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Cruz is signaling that he will aggressively seek out the support of the party’s socially conservative voters, a bloc with some degree of overlap with the tea party. 
 
 His father, Rafael Cruz, a pastor, spoke at Liberty in November 2013 about his experiences as a Cuban refugee and the need for Christians to be involved citizens. Ted Cruz himself spoke at Liberty in April 2014 about threats to religious liberty in America. The school’s newspaper reported Sunday that the university president, Jerry Falwell (the elder Falwell’s son) received a call from Cruz’s camp only last week about the event. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat who is close to the Clintons, was initially scheduled to speak on Monday, the report said, and he declined the offer to share a stage with Cruz or remain the only speaker and push Cruz’s event to the afternoon. 
 
 While Cruz will have some competition for the social conservative vote from potential candidates including Santorum and Mike Huckabee, he is well-positioned to compete in states like Iowa and South Carolina, where Christian conservatives are an influential bloc. The senator, who is comfortable using religious language, is slated to appear next month at the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators’ “Homeschool Day at the Capitol” in Iowa. Later in the month he will be at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition’s spring kick-off in the Hawkeye State. 
 
 Aides said his announcement on Monday would highlight Cruz’s oratorical skills, one of his chief strengths. During his two years in the Senate, Cruz — a former Texas solicitor general who has argued nine times before the U.S. Supreme Court — became best known for his pre-shutdown, 21-hour speech on the Senate floor in September 2013 in which he spoke of the need to defund Obamacare. 
 
 He has long been building contact lists for his leadership PAC, the Jobs, Growth and Freedom Fund, often asking people attending his speeches to text words such as “growth” to a designated number, which gets them signed up. On Sunday night, a text from the PAC promised an “exciting announcement soon” and urged recipients to keep an an eye on Twitter. And with one 81-character missive, the presidential cycle was on. 
 
 Gabriel Debenedetti contributed to this report.
– If it seems like it's already gone on for years, we are currently 596 (five hundred ninety-six) days away from the election that will determine the next president of the United States of America. But we are only one day away from the first official hat getting tossed into the 2016 ring by one of the many who been circling it, and the Houston Chronicle reports that it belongs to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Unnamed senior advisers say the Republican will announce his candidacy tomorrow, skipping right past the exploratory committee fun (looking at you, Jim Webb) and going right for the hat-tossing. More unnamed sources confirm the pending announcement to the AP, which notes Cruz will likely be soon joined by the likes of Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio. And if 2016 doesn't work out for Cruz, he'll keep his current day job until 2019.