It isn’t just that he makes life difficult for others, but also that he’s kind of a jerk about it. Which leads me to a necessary confession: I find Cruz utterly repellent, on a real gut level, and most of the liberals I know feel the same way.

That’s no basis on which to make rational political judgments, but it is what it is. There’s a self-satisfied smarminess about Cruz that is just inescapable. His manner is always exactly the same, the varieties of human emotion distilled down to a smirk and a sneer. He’s about as charming as the lawyer who sues the school district because his kid got a 99 instead of 100 on a geography quiz.

That’s all subjective, of course. I’m sure the conservatives who regard Cruz as a hero of the Tea Party find him to be a perfectly pleasant fellow, in addition to sharing their values and being plenty smart (which he is, even if his grasp of policy never seems to go deeper than an inch, however well-polished that inch might be).

In any case, at a time when one candidate after another is demonstrating their weaknesses, the idea of Cruz being the Republican nominee has gone from ridiculous to plausible.