Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” host Dana Bash grilled Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on his lack of experience being similar to then-Sen. Barack Obama’s when he ran for president .

Cruz defended his qualifications saying, “In his time in the Senate he had basically been a backbencher; he had not been leading on any issues of any significance. In my time in the Senate you can accuse me of being a lot of things but a backbencher is not one of them.”

“Unlike Barack Obama, I was not a community organizer before I was elected to the Senate,” he said. “I spent five-and-a-half years as the solicitor general of Texas … I supervised and led every appeal for the state of Texas in a 4,000-person agency with over 700 lawyers. Over the course of five-and-a-half years, over and over again Texas led the nation defending conservative principles and winning,” he added.

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