Ted Cruz rarely comes to New York, other than those occasional visits to Goldman Sachs, where this man of virtue drops his hat on the ground and juggles lemons for campaign donations.
But his attack on Donald Trump's "New York values" strikes us as fatuous on so many levels, starting with the fact that such a construct is impossible to define.
It's a lazy way to characterize a melting pot that defies stereotypes: Life in TriBeCa is not like life in Sheepshead Bay. The culture of Rego Park is not the culture of Harlem. The accents of Riverdale are unlike the accents of Astoria. The rhythms of City Island bare no resemblance to the rhythms of Flatbush. The politics of New Dorp are nothing like the politics of Battery Park City.
Perhaps Cruz simply values homogeneity, though it's doubtful he likes any word that begins with those four letters.
But we get it: Attacking diversity, especially the kind that exists in a city where they speak 800 languages, appeals to the feeble-minded denizens of flyover states. Their political heroes do not celebrate New York as the birthplace of immigration, industrialization, and multiculturalism, because it is easier to slander its progressivism.
And New York represents what Cruz fears: an exhilarating laboratory of life, where the rest of the country can learn something about tolerance and the marriage of disparate elements.
Trump could have mentioned that at Thursday night's debate, when he made a clumsy but well-intended parry that raised the values revealed after 9-11. He tried to explain the humanity demonstrated across that apocalyptic 14-acre landscape of jagged steel and dust and death, where Americans from 50 states spoke to the very best that the city and country had to offer.
He could have shared how he witnessed the ineffably beautiful New York value of men and women who were willing to sprint into burning skyscrapers to save the lives of people they never met, only to never come out.
But mostly, Trump could have reminded Cruz about something he personally forgot: that New York is forever the index of our possibilities - a place of inspiration and creativity and small-D democratic values, where people prove that you cannot profess to love America while denigrating Americans.
More: Recent Star-Ledger editorials.
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