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.