Where Paul wears turtlenecks, sports weird hair, and talks about letting states decide their own laws on drugs and marriage, Cruz is rocking a retrograde, wet-look haircut and is unambiguously and unambivalently conservative on any social issue, including the phantom menace of Sharia law (“an enormous problem” in America, according to Cruz). You’d think Cruz’s Ivy League bona fides—undergrad at Princeton, law school at Harvard—would hurt his street cred with disgruntled flyover-country independents and Republicans, but he’s playing it perfectly. His diplomas certify that’s he’s just as “whip-smart” as President Obama even as he can testify from personal experience that Harvard Law is housing a dozen “Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”
Indeed, Cruz’s greatest political asset is the disgust he inspires in mainstream liberals. Every jab by Beltway Draco Malfoys such as The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank (who sniffs that Cruz is “an opportunist driven more by ambition than ideology”) and get-a-load-of-this eye-rolling by coastal elitists (Cruz was “creepy” as an undergrad and strolled around Princeton in a “paisley bathrobe”) make him more effective with his core audience. GQ readers may think Jason Zengerle’s well-wrought hatchet job has shown all the world what a pompous, humble-bragging jackass Cruz really is: he can’t stop namedropping! He’s got a self-aggrandizing portrait of himself in his Senate office! He insulted the venerable Sen. Dianne Feinstein! The “maverick” John McCain “fucking hates” him! But the GQ piece, like all liberal criticism of Cruz, and even vaguely contentious interviews with semi-conservative types such as Chris Wallace of Fox News, makes him a bigger hero to his fans.
The odds are that neither Paul nor Cruz will be president. It’s nothing against them; it’s just that the odds are stacked against any individual. But commentators who think these guys are in politics only for themselves are missing the energy that’s driving the wacko birds. Maybe, just maybe, they really do believe in shrinking the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. And maybe they realize that their vehicle of choice, the Republican Party, really does need to reach out to new swaths of the electorate while holding on to conservatives.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member