Conservatives to Cruz: 'Run, Ted, run'

Conservatives to Cruz: 'Run, Ted, run'
By Alexandra Jaffe - 09-01-13 12:30 PM ET

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was met with enthusiastic cheers from an "adoring" audience during his address at a conservative summit on Saturday, the friendliest of any of the potential 2016 presidential hopefuls to speak at the Defending the Dream summit.

The event, hosted by Americans for Prosperity, drew a handful of other conservative stars and would-be presidential contenders: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R ) and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R ) all spoke.

But according to The Washington Post, none received so warm a welcome as Cruz. He was met with chants of "Run, Ted, run!" after giving a speech focused largely on the imperative of defunding ObamaCare, a cause which he and a handful of other conservatives in the Senate have championed in recent weeks.

Cruz slammed fellow Republicans who have criticized the push as potentially politically harmful and pledged not to back down from a threat to shut down the government if the law is not defunded.

“Right now, the people who are fighting the hardest against our effort to defund Obamacare are sadly Republican,” he said. “Over and over again, they say, ‘We can’t win this fight.’ Well, you know — you lose 100 percent of the fights that you surrender at the outset.”

Cruz has fast emerged as a darling of the conservative movement, taking a place somewhat lost by Rubio after the Florida senator took the lead on immigration reform, drawing him criticism from conservatives and leading to a drop in many national polls of the 2016 GOP presidential landscape.

Indeed, Rubio's reception at the same summit on Friday was decidedly less enthusiastic. Though he received cheers for parts of his speech, he was also heckled over immigration reform with shouts of "No amnesty!" from the crowd.

In contrast, Cruz took the stage to a sustained standing ovation and exited to calls for him to run for president.