During a rally in Iowa on Friday evening, Ted Cruz made a joke that went over fine with his audience – but was less popular once the wider world caught wind.
Replying to a woman who asked him about holding someone accountable for the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi in 2012, Cruz said that she was “exactly right.” He criticized President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for “engag(ing) in deception” on the matter. Then he zeroed in on Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee for the presidency.
“We do know Hillary told her daughter Chelsea, ‘Well, gosh, I knew it was a terrorist attack, while we were out telling the American people it wasn’t,’ ” Cruz said. “You know I’ll tell you, in my house, if my daughter Catherine, the 5-year-old, says something she knows to be false, she gets a spanking.”
He added: “Well, in America, the voters have a way of administering a spanking.”
While it’s never hard to find outraged people on social media, there was certainly an element in the response to Cruz’s comments that struck a nerve. Former George W. Bush strategist Matthew Dowd, now a commentator for ABC, stated that Cruz was not “a real man” for using corporal punishment on his daughter. Others expressed similar surprise.
And according to numbers from the General Social Survey conducted every two years by the National Opinion Research Center, America is slowly growing less supportive of spanking children. But a majority of Americans still support it.
This used to be pretty nonpartisan. But over time, Democrats and independents started growing less supportive of the use of spanking, while Republicans continued to support it strongly. That doesn’t quite show the full picture, though. Black Americans have consistently been more supportive of spanking children than white Americans. And since a large part of the base of Democratic voters is black, that pulls the Democrats’ numbers up. In 2014, more than half of white Democrats opposed spanking a child while 80 percent of white Republicans thought it OK.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.