Via the Free Beacon. He says he didn’t mean Cruz can’t be defined as Hispanic, just that Cruz shouldn’t be defined exclusively by race. His problem is that he’s saying this against a backdrop of 25 years of liberals accusing Clarence Thomas of being inauthentically black because his politics are right-wing rather than left. And political operatives on both sides understand that if Cruz lands on the ticket in three years, attacks of this sort in ways subtle and not will be thrown at him. Peter Beinart wrote a piece for Newsweek this morning titled “Yes, Democrats Can Be Racist” (really?) chastising Dem Dick Harpootlian for his nasty comment about Nikki Haley, and speculating that that’ll become more frequent on the left as Republicans elect more minorities. True, but the blowback potential from cracks like that guarantees that they’ll be rare-ish. The likelier leftist reaction to GOP diversity, I think, will be to double down on the sort of determinism that Thomas has been demagogued with. You won’t hear people tell Haley to go back where she came from, you’ll hear them tell her that she’s betrayed her race by carrying water for the “white party.” The boss emeritus has been getting that from the left for decades. I think it might get worse before it gets better.

Anyway, enough Richardson. The more interesting Cruz-related clip yesterday came, surprisingly, from James Carville, who was near-rapturous about Cruz’s retail skills. Watch below. I can’t tell if this is Serpenthead paying legit respect to a worthy adversary or some sort of sly briar-patch play where he’s promoting a guy whom he thinks would be easiest for Hillary to beat. Verdict?

Update: After you’re done with these two clips, go watch “Morning Joe” wrestle with the fact that, by their own admission, Harpootlian’s remark about Haley would have been five-alarm news if he was a Republican. That fits nicely with the point I’ve been making lately about Gosnell: The media is more open about its biases than it was 10 years ago. Just don’t expect them to do much about it.