The next time Cruz shows up here he should tear himself away from his friends at Goldman Sachs and make a side trip to the Bronx and explain himself there on New York values; or to the Lower East Side, or Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or Jamaica, Queens, or 125th St. in Harlem. He should go talk to people in the Rockaways or Staten Island, the hardened survivors who bound together after Hurricane Sandy, about New York values. Or finally he should go all the way downtown, and back to September 2001.

Here is what New York values are: New York values are a young guy, a paralegal, literally giving somebody he doesn’t know the shirt off his back on a subway because winter has finally come to the city and brought freezing temperatures with it. New York values are the New York taxi driver who traveled three boroughs across four days to find the guy who had left $1,400 in his cab, so he could return the money to him. You know what that really was? It was the real life of a city that Ted Cruz knows nothing about. He is simply another tourist here, one constantly on the make.

The best of this city is the best of this country, and always has been. When it was hit in a way that no American city had ever been hit, it came together and rose up together in a moment as thrilling as any America had ever seen.