During the months when Cruz was flattering Trump and mimicking his bigotry, he seems also to have been building up his own store of personal insults, which he is deploying now.
.. Many politicians are shameless; what seems to set Cruz apart is his unhidden pride in the craft of the political slur, the artistry of nastiness.
How Cruz beat Trump
By targeting evangelicals and libertarians from the very start, he dominated from the two most reliable Iowa voting blocs.
Meanwhile, Cruz’s father, Pastor Rafael Cruz, boosted his son’s name identification as he kept up an intense schedule of church visits across the state. Other campaigns were miffed that at Christian conferences over the past several years, there were often two entries under the Cruz name. But Rafael Cruz was a key entry point for pastors, whom he urged at church gatherings over the summer to take a hard look at his son.
“It’s one thing to meet a senator, it’s another thing for a pastor to meet and talk with a pastor, a guy who speaks your language, knows your heart, knows your struggles,” said Pastor Mike Demastus, who is backing Cruz. “There’s a connection point with Pastor Rafael Cruz. He’s one of us, he knows who we are. He has been, pardon the pun, a wonderful secret weapon for Sen. Cruz.”
.. Cruz put on an elaborate event in Des Moines in which he played part preacher, part therapist as he sat onstage with people who ran into legal problems over, for example, refusing to do floral arrangements for a gay wedding. Meanwhile, his campaign continued recruiting pastors.
.. After the Paris terrorist attacks of Nov. 13, national security issues damaged the political outsider image that initially pushed the pediatric neurosurgeon to the forefront, creating an opening for someone with more experience. Cruz pounced, playing up at every turn his knowledge of foreign affairs and pushing legislation to bar most Syrian refugees from coming to the United States, as conservatives grew increasingly fearful that those migrants could pose a threat.
.. “If I’m going to let Rubio redefine Cruz … we’re going to end up with open borders and cultural suicide, a mirror of what we’re seeing today. That was the galvanizing piece that brought it together.”
.. “Strap on the full armor of God,” Cruz told supporters in a New Year’s Eve conference call.
.. The voters open to Trump and Rubio received negative, contrasting information, but the Cruz campaign offered only positive messages to those also looking at Carson in the days leading up to the caucuses.
The Field Guide to Ted Cruz
Because Cruz is currently running for the Republican nomination, the perception that he is a ferocious hard-liner serves his interests, and he’s not likely to dispute it.
.. What’s ironic is that Cruz is one of the least erratic people in national politics. The oddities in his behavior are strategic rather than spontaneous. In interviews, for example, he often gives answers that have clearly been rehearsed; that’s not “normal,” per se, but it makes sense if you’re an ambitious politician, being interviewed or questioned in public.
.. It’s possible that Cruz wouldn’t have taken his defunding campaign so far had it cost him anything, or put his own ambitions at risk.
.. Instead, I proceed on the assumption that Cruz is smarter than me—not that he’s a superior human who Americans should follow blindly, and not that he’s always right. Just that he’s smarter than me. In practice, that means when Cruz says or does something that doesn’t make sense to me, I ask myself what I’m missing. I take a step back and slowly puzzle through why a very smart person with certain well-documented strategic objectives would do that. Lord knows this is not my usual practice with politicians, but it has turned out to be a surprisingly effective technique for analyzing Cruz. I highly recommend it.
.. But it creates two complications that are, I think, worth remembering. First: between his intelligence and his verbal agility, Cruz is easily able to elide questions, or to answer them in a lawyerly, nuanced way. Such deftness can be a lifesaver for a politician who’s been put on the spot, and Cruz’s nuanced arguments are often quite interesting, but such answers can also seem like sophistry, and over time, have fueled suspicions that Cruz is a phony.
.. Most of his Republican colleagues in Congress agreed with at least some of his critiques of the Affordable Care Act itself; all of them who were there in 2009, after all, had voted against it in the first place. Their criticisms of Cruz hinged on the premise that his defunding campaign had no realistic chance of succeeding. Democrats controlled the Senate. And as Tom Coburn pointed out, Obama would presumably not have been pleased if Congress sent him a bill that defunded his signature effort; Cruz would ultimately have had to convince dozens of Democrats, in both chambers, to join Republicans in voting to override a presidential veto. From that point of view, the wacko bird from Texas had arguably engineered a government shutdown for no possible productive purpose. Cruz, not surprisingly, was keen to argue that the effort was worth a chance, and that the chance did in fact exist.
.. In addition to carefully framing his briefs, it turns out, he went into every Supreme Court appearance with an individuated understanding of the nine justices on the bench, and some arguments tailored to the ones likely to cast the swing vote.
.. I enjoyed interviewing Cruz; he’s intelligent and thoughtful. But under normal circumstances, he’s so disciplined and on message that there’s almost no point in asking him a question. You’re more likely to find the answer by using the Cruz rules in conjunction with inferential reasoning.
.. With very few exceptions, what he said is exactly what he meant to say. Thanks to this technique, I was able to discover Cruz’s position on immigration reform all the way back in 2013.
.. Cruz is fiscally conservative, and focused on fiscal issues; socially conservative, but only once or twice a season; pragmatic rather than ideological; and, as noted earlier, not nearly as radical as his reputation would suggest.
Ted Cruz’s Iowa Mailers Are More Fraudulent Than Everyone Thinks
In 2008, academics at Yale published an influential paper showing that one of the most effective ways to get voters to the polls was “social pressure.” Researchers found that registered voters in a 2006 primary election in Michigan voted at a higher rate if they received mailers indicating that their participation in the election would be publicized.
.. “I will apologize to no one for using every tool we can to encourage Iowa voters to come out and vote,” he told reporters during a campaign stop in Sioux City.
.. “There are other people listed on my mailer who live in my neighborhood that are all different ages, but everyone on this sheet has the same score of fifty-five per cent,” he said. “Some are significantly younger and would have not been eligible to vote in these elections, and others are older and have voted consistently, going back years. There is no way to get to us all having the same score.”
.. “I’m crippled, so I can’t go to the caucus,” Holstein said. She was not happy about being shamed in front of her neighbors. “That’s what you call a bully,” she said about Cruz’s tactics. “I wish he would quit.”