The Slatest

Ted Cruz’s “Basketball Ring” Just Entered the Pantheon of Political Gaffes

Ted Cruz during his infamous April 26 rally in Knightstown, Indiana.

Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

As a folksy-talking caricature of an Indiana farmer might put it, things ain’t lookin’ too good for Ted Cruz. A few minutes after the polls closed, all of the networks projected that he’d lost the Indiana primary to Donald Trump. Nationally, new Gallup info shows, his reputation among Republicans has plummeted into the bottom of a large, disgusting dumpster. (His net favorability rating has gone from +46 to -6 just since the beginning of 2016.)

It is in this context that Cruz’s ghastly/hilarious April 26 Hoosiers gaffe—in an attempt to reference a famous scene from the movie, he called a basketball hoop a “basketball ring”—is about to become immortal. In botching a sports reference as his poll numbers dropped, Cruz made the ultimate political mistake. It’s not (just) that he screwed up: Cruz’s mistake was that he screwed up in a way that reinforced pre-existing beliefs about him and then immediately lost an election.

Think about the politicians in recent memory who are most defined by embarrassing moments: John Kerry, Mitt Romney, Al Gore. The allegedly insecure Gore, of course, supposedly boasted to have “invented the Internet.” The aristocratic Romney slagged 47 percent of the populace as no-good layabouts and referred to sports as “sport.” The out-of-touch Kerry called Manny Ramirez “Manny Ortez” and praised Wisconsin’s famous “Lambert” Field.

All politicians are to some extent insincere, and all of them gaffe it up. The ones who can’t shake those gaffes are the candidates that don’t give people anything else to remember. Ted Kennedy once called Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa “Mike McGwire and Sammey Sooser” (listen to it, it’s hilarious), but that wasn’t the first line of his obituary. Barack Obama won’t be pegged (by most people, that is) as the guy who said that middle Americans “cling to guns or religion.”

Tuesday afternoon I spoke to Greg Rakestraw, program director of Indianapolis ESPN Radio affiliate 1070 The Fan. I asked him if Indiana sports-fan voters were still talking about the “basketball ring” moment around the proverbial water cooler. His answer, to put it bluntly, was no. The gaffe was the subject of chatter “maybe for the day after it happened,” Rakestraw said. “It’s not like a week removed they’re still talking about it.” For his part, Rakestraw said he thinks a borderline-insensitive allusion to the Indy 500 that Cruz made in the course of a comment about “crashing and burning” may have played even worse in Indiana than the basketball gaffe. But neither statement “about our beloved automobile race or our beloved sport,” he told me, actually hurt the senator as much as the deal he made with John Kasich in which Kasich effectively conceded the state to Cruz. (Other outlets have reported that the Kasich-Cruz deal has irritated voters who see it as an instance of crass insider politics.)

It’s clear that Ted Cruz was already falling in the polls well before his April 26 Hoosiers flub and that there are a number of reasons for his drop that have nothing to do with basketball rings. But Cruz already has a reputation as a pandering careerist who is only vaguely humanoid. So when he came off like a weirdo during a failed attempt at pandering, enemies ranging from Bobby Knight to Sarah Palin to President Obama jumped in to use it against him. The basketball-ring speech was “a turning point,” an Indiana Democratic operative told MSNBC even as he identified a number of more substantive strategic errors Cruz has made in the state. In other words, it was already pretty much game over for Ted Cruz when he showed up to give his speech on April 26. “Basketball ring” was just a final desperation heave made all the more memorable because it landed so far short of the basket. And that’s what Ted Cruz and I call a no-ring ball.