There is also a Cult of Destruction intent on stamping out Ted Cruz as quickly as possible — often on the pretty lame grounds that he just isn’t honoring the well established rules of the Senate that never favor the bold or those willing to lead. Cruz is unwilling to play the game the way others have played it. The Establishment likes to punish that sort. In ages past, there was no twitter or Facebook to defend the boat rockers.

The base looks at Democrats after 2004 and don’t see a party that gave up, but doubled down against George W. Bush. They see a Republican Party that, after 2012, walked off the field. They walked off too.

Many of the pundits and analysts know how unlikely Cruz’s strategy is. They’re right. But the problem here is not that so many are convinced Cruz’s strategy won’t work, but that they either don’t want to try it in the first place or want to attack it with no real plan of their own.

The activists who support Cruz and Lee recognize their strategy might not work, but they also see it as the only strategy and the one that will, even if not successful, yield a better ending hand than the Republican Leadership would otherwise settle for. Their proof lies in Cut, Cap, and Balance, but for which the activists are convinced the GOP would never have even gotten sequestration cuts.