Running for president is apparently taking a toll on Ted Cruz.
In a recent campaign fundraising email, the Texas senator enumerated the “significant sacrifices” he was making in his bid for the highest office in the US, including daily attacks from the liberal media, no time with his family, not as much sleep as he would like and no personal time.
Elizabeth Warren, the firebrand US senator who many hoped would run for president, had some choice words for Cruz: quit the whining. “We’re supposed to pity him because trying to be the leader of the free world is hard?! I’ve got two words for you, Ted: Boo hoo,” she wrote on her Facebook page.
Warren noted that the people making real sacrifices were not gilded politicians, but people with no paid leave who can’t stay home when they are sick or their kids are sick, or workers who toil like hell to save money but can’t because they are suffering under staggering debt loads and stagnant wages.
Know who gets no personal time? People who work two minimum wage jobs to support their families. Know who gets no family time? Moms with unfair schedules who drop their kids off at daycare and drive halfway across town only to find their work hours have been cancelled.
According to Warren, Cruz is personally responsible for making the lives of these workers harder. He opposes mandatory paid family and medical leave—which he dubs “free stuff”, voted against student loan refinancing, and thinks the minimum wage is “bad policy”.
And yet he felt the need to share with his supporters some of his own hardships. “The sacrifices of our campaign are steep, but I am proud to be making them on your behalf,” the email said. Then he actually listed his sacrifices. He signed off by saying he is “willingly” making these sacrifices despite the “high-cost”.
Workers can’t afford the luxury of complaining, Warren said. “…[T]hey don’t whine. They don’t throw tantrums or try to shut down their workplace because they don’t get their way—and then turn around and demand promotions,” she wrote.
The post will serve as a bitter reminder to some of what might have been. Warren’s supporters pined for her to run for president, but she said she never contemplated a presidential bid because she felt she could be more effective in the Senate (and perhaps because the inevitability of a Clinton candidacy was a more foregone conclusion back then).
But that hasn’t diminished her message.
Senator Cruz—you chose to run for President. Working people don’t get a choice. Maybe you should spend less time complaining about your “significant sacrifices”—and more time trying to do something about theirs.