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Cruz tried to cut away at O’Rourke’s charismatic appeal by contrasting their records on taxes, immigration, border security, health care and deregulation.
O’Rourke, he said, would raise taxes and increase regulations, which would stymie economic growth. He also said O’Rourke wants “open borders” and has supported expanding Obamacare, which he called “a disastrous law.”
“There is no clearer divide in any race in the country than in this state of Texas,” Cruz said. “The difference between my record and Congressman O’Rourke’s record is night and day.”
O’Rourke in Amarillo
O’Rourke, in a mid-morning appearance at Six Car Pub, a brew pub in downtown Amarillo, joked about listeners who might be grabbing a beer to start the work week.
He drew some of his loudest applause when he extolled the courage and contributions of immigrants from Latin America, some of whom have come to Amarillo, “to give to — not take away from — the American Dream.”
O’Rourke laid into Trump’s now-abandoned policy of separating unauthorized immigrant children from their families at the border and sending them as far away as Michigan to languish for months in foster care.
“What if we decided that never again would we allow another child to be taken from their parents,” he said, to sustained clapping and shouts of approval.
Border issues
The crowd of more than 300 people also cheered when he vowed to help “make sure that every single Dreamer is freed from the fear of deportation.” He referred to children brought to this country without papers.
Speaking to reporters before he rallied about 1,300 people in Lubbock, O’Rourke denounced the Trump administration’s plan to increase the number of U.S. troops at the border to about 5,000, as reported first by the Wall Street Journal.
“This is a perfect opportunity for us to choose whether we will be defined by our fears, the paranoia that the president seeks to stoke about a group of people who are still more than 900 miles away from the border,” he said. A rich and powerful nation such as the U.S. should seek to end the root causes of the migration in Central America — poverty and violence, he said.
Cruz, though, blasted O’Rourke’s positions on border security and immigration.
Speaking to a standing-room only crowd of more than 1,300 at Christian Fellowship Church in Harlingen, just a few miles from the border, Cruz declared the mostly Latino city his territory.
Recounting how a CNN reporter asked him if Texas should vote in O’Rourke to get more diversity in the Senate, Cruz said, as the son of a Cuban immigrant, he took umbrage at that. There are plenty of senators of Irish ancestry, he said in a poke at O’Rourke.
O’Rourke, asked about the comment, said, “I’m going to focus on the future of the country.”
Cruz told his Harlingen audience, “The Rio Grande Valley is conservative. Hispanics, we were always the conservative Democrats.”
Hispanics, he said, care most about faith, family and patriotism — conservative values. The current Democratic Party has gone so far to the left, he said, that conservative Democrats no longer feel there’s a place for them.
When a woman shouted, “Beto no bueno” (Beto is no good), Cruz replied, “Asi es (that’s right).”
Rosa and Oberlin Fonseca, a Republican couple, said they were happy to see Cruz campaigning in the Rio Grande Valley on the issues of border security, opposing abortion and cutting government spending.
“The Republican Party needs to count the Valley in, because we’ve been neglected,” said Oberlin Fonseca, 73.
“I think our country can turn to socialism,” said Rosa Fonseca, 65, a retired school nurse. “The Democratic Party has become unrecognizable.”
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