In the last minutes of Wednesday in New York City, CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert unleashed his loathing of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and his re-election campaign, mocking a musical commercial mocking the nickname of his Democrat opponent ‘Beto’ O’Rourke, set to the Alabama country-music hit "If You're Gonna Play in Texas (You Gotta Have a Fiddle in the Band)."
“Yesterday was primary day in Texas, and the Democrats are pumped,” Colbert began. “Dem turnout topped one million in a midterm primary for the first time since 2002.”
Even as he showed that fact on screen, highlighted by a CNN.com story, the CNN story was headlined “Democratic turnout could signal blue wave in November -- but not in Texas.” CNN’s Harry Enten reported:
Democratic turnout did top one million in a midterm primary for the first time since 2002, but it still lagged well behind the over 1.5 million votes cast in the Republican primary. Put another way, 60% of all votes cast in Tuesday night's primary went to Republican candidates. That's 20 points more than the 40% that went to Democratic candidates.
Don’t trouble the CBS comedian with the inconvenient facts. He kept touting trouble for Ted. “Amongst the winners was Democrat Beto O'Rourke, who is now set to take on Republican senator Ted Cruz. You may not have heard of Beto O’Rourke, but no candidate gets voters more excited than ‘Not Ted Cruz.’ I hear ‘Not Ted Cruz’ is strong this year,” he cracked.
How strong? Let’s consider how Karl Rove summarized it in The Wall Street Journal:
Mr. O’Rourke spent $4.2 million to win his primary with 62%. But he lost 103 of the state’s 254 counties to Edward Kimbrough, a retired Postal Service employee, who spent $785 and received 15%, and Sema Hernandez, who spent nothing—zero, zip, nada—and still got 24%. ( Ms. Hernandez did have a Facebook page.) Mr. Cruz received twice as many votes in his primary as Mr. O’Rourke did in his.
But Colbert is on a roll about “Beto-mentum.”
COLBERT: Texas might be feeling the Beto-mentum, because so far this year, O’Rourke out-raised Ted Cruz by $1.5 million—and that has gotten Ted Cruz serious about this race. So serious, he released a novelty song. Yeah, they don’t call him ‘Weird Ted Cruz’ for nothing. They call him that because he’s weird.
After playing the song, Colbert added “Well, that was unlikable, not good, and I don't like it. Really makes you think of Ted Cruz.” Then he rolled a clip of Cruz defending his musical mockery of O’Rourke’s name during an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo. “In terms of the jingle, some of it is just have a sense of humor,” Cruz told Cuomo Wednesday.
“Some of it is just have a since of humor,” Colbert repeated. “The rest of it is just awful.”
Cuomo had a point that Cruz was born Rafael Edward Cruz and goes by an Anglicized “Ted,” while Robert O’Rourke goes by a ethnicized “Beto.” However, Cruz was born to a Cuban father and an Irish/Italian mother. O’Rourke was born to an Irish mother and an Irish father, but less informed voters might wrongly conclude he’s of mixed heritage.
Colbert then descended into an English teacher’s rant that the song shouldn’t rhyme “man” with “man ,” so Colbert performed his own lame version of the song that ended with they lyric “Ted Cruz sucks.”
