Ted Cruz isn't that different from most Republicans. So why do people hate him more?

The other night in the San Jacinto Room at the Lone Star Convention & Expo Center, (great acoustics!), things were basically normal for a couple hours.

Unlike so much now, what transpired in the San Jacinto Room mostly fell within the realm of what you’d expect from a Republican event: Top 40 country, popcorn and Bud Light, people catching up in the aisle, cheers for conservative judges, Ted Cruz talking about guns and Israel and, overwhelmingly, about the beneficence of low taxes and less regulation, how they’re blessing Texas with good fortune, and how Beto O’Rourke is against both.

This isn’t wrong, exactly, at least not in terms of the gulf between them. O’Rourke does want a bigger government that provides more services, even if it’s more expensive; Cruz wants it leaner and meaner, even if it’s literally meaner sometimes. O’Rourke is really liberal; Cruz is really conservative.

But when it’s laid out like that, there’s that sense of, like, “Oh, right.”