Ted Cruz missile a dud in Donald Trump's New York

WASHINGTON: There's the United States of America, the pluralist melting pot of race, religion, and ethnicity. And there's Middle America, dubbed Jesusland by the liberal literati, a purist enclave of White, Christian, Conservative faith. When Texas senator and Republican presidential aspirant Ted Cruz arrived in the Bronx neighbourhood in New York City on Wednesday to campaign for the upcoming primaries in the state, he was essentially going from one ideological territory to another.

The boos and jeers he heard from the Bronx brotherhood (called the Bronx cheer) had as much to do with his derisive remarks about "New York values" which he associates with rival Donald Trump, as with the city's dislike of religious extremism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Students of the Bronx Lighthouse College Preparatory Academy wrote to the school principal asking her to cancel a Cruz visit, terming him "misogynistic, homophobic, and racist." And immigrant protesters hooted him out of a Chinese-Dominican restaurant calling him an anti-immigrant, right-wing bigot.

Even the media gave him a torrid send-off. "Ted Cruz came to New York (on) Wednesday talking about education, but he's the one who got schooled," observed the New York Daily News, which has made no secret of its distaste for Republicans. "Take The F U Train, Ted," blared the banner headline, after he reportedly inquired how to get out of Bronx. Even Latinos lambasted him, though he claims to be of Hispanic extract.

The hostility Cruz encountered should favour Trump, whose stomping ground New York is, even though the state itself is a write-off for Republicans in the presidential election. But for what it is worth, Trump, who has addressed large crowds, is poised to win the Republican primaries in a state with a large number of delegates, and regain some momentum in the race towards the party nomination. But Democratic voters in the state are having a harder time deciding between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, particularly after Sanders raised the pitch on Wednesday by portraying Clinton as part of the New York elite while positioning himself as a populist underdog with an anti-corporate platform.

"Are you qualified to be president of the United States when you're raising millions of dollars from Wall Street, an entity whose greed, recklessness and illegal behaviour helped destroy our economy?" the self-described socialist senator asked rhetorically of Clinton, as his supporters spread the word of the red flag he had raised about the financial shenanigans that the elite of the world conducted through Panama. Most polls show Hillary Clinton leading in New York.

Although born in Chicago, she is considered a New Yorker by virtue of her being elected senator from the State. Sanders, who is a senator from Vermont, was born in Brooklyn, New York.