In a cover story for the April 18 Time magazine, Washington bureau chief Michael Scherer described the “painful choice” Republicans face over embracing the “hated” Ted Cruz. The cover featured an extreme close up of the Republican senator with the headline, “Likable Enough?” Regarding Cruz’s Wisconsin win, Scherer skeptically wrote, “It was something to see when the most hated Senator in Washington began to sound like the Great Unifier for the Grand Old Party.”
Regarding Cruz’s ideological purity, the journalist asserted, “Which is why Republicans now face an extraordinary and painful choice: Which flawed, disliked flag bearer do they want to go into battle against Hillary Clinton?”
He worried, “The Cruz path promises a return to the purity of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan’s broad-shouldered muscle and the idealism of Ayn Rand.”
Focusing on Cruz as unendingly rigid, Scherer described the Senator as hated:
In his brief Senate career, Cruz seemed to go out of his way to make enemies, fundraising for groups that oppose incumbent Republicans, leading a hopeless charge in 2013 to shut down the government in the name of repealing Obamacare and objecting to procedural moves that would have prevented Republicans from taking difficult votes to raise the debt ceiling.
In contrast, the MRC’s Tim Graham noticed the “mostly gushy cover story” in February on Clinton:
Someone just paging through the magazine at say, a dentist’s office – if any one of those still subscribes to Time – would catch the Hillary article with the silly headline “Do You See Her Now? After more than four decades in the spotlight, Hillary Clinton is finally coming into view.”
The pull quote from Time writer Joe Klein on the next page is “Clinton has become so encrusted with notoriety at this point that it’s near impossible for her to get a clean shot to make her argument.”
Notice that Clinton's front cover is more flattering and not an extreme close-up. Cruz's cover is reminiscent of Newsweek's awkward Michele Bachmann cover.
