Ted Cruz Likes Being Hated
The Texas senator is running against Republicans as much as Democrats, and he claims Reagan was more loathed in 1980 than he is now.
By Joseph Rago
Jan. 22, 2016 5:41 p.m. ET
920 COMMENTS
Exeter, N.H.
Ted Cruz isn’t running against Marco Rubio or Donald J. Trump or even Hillary Clinton, not really. His real opponent is the Republican establishment, or the permanent syndicate of politicians, lobbyists, donors, business interests and insiders that he calls “the Washington cartel.” Such a thing must exist, because everybody says it does—though this week how much power the establishment possesses became the dominant ontological question of the primaries in both parties.
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton traded epithets about who qualified for membership. (They’re both right.) Meanwhile, the Republican establishmentarians can’t protect a speaker of the House or prevent the two candidates they abhor the most from surging to the top of the GOP field.
The freshman Texas senator, to adapt FDR’s response to charges of being a class turncoat, welcomes their hatred—if that word is sufficiently forceful, which it isn’t. “You know, when we launched this campaign, the New York Times promptly opined, ‘Cruz cannot win, because the Washington elites despise him.’ I kinda thought that was the whole point of the campaign,” Mr. Cruz tells the audience in well-heeled Exeter, some of whom look like Times readers.
He’s finishing the last leg of the weeklong “Cruzin’ to Victory” bus tour that has taken him around New Hampshire, including north of the White Mountains. Watching Mr. Cruz in a forum where he is trying to be liked rather than detested can be disorienting. He usually begins by explaining what he intends to do on his first day in office and “in the days that follow,” and his talks are brightened by geniality, personability and corny humor that are rarely in evidence in the Senate cloak room.
“Look, would it kill Republicans to crack a joke? Actually, some of them I think it might,” he says. “You know, have a little fun, for Pete’s sake.”
“In the days that follow,” Mr. Cruz continues, “we’ll take on the EPA and the CFPB and the alphabet soup of federal agencies that have descended like locusts on small businesses, killing jobs all across this country. You know, a few years back I was in West Texas. And I asked folks out there, I said, ‘What’s the difference between regulators and locusts?’ Said, well, ‘The thing is, you can’t use pesticides on regulators.’ This old West Texas farmer leaned back, said, ‘Wanna bet?’ ” He affects an adenoidal twang.
The joke gets a laugh, and it is funny, sort of, as long as the listener shares the underlying political assumptions. Also, as long as the listener is hearing it for the first time.
Mr. Cruz rolled out the same wisecrack—word for word, beat for beat, gesture for gesture—the night before at a barn rally in Rye, as he would later that evening at a town hall in Hollis, and the next day at a pizza parlor in Manchester.
“Scripture tells us, there’s nothing new under the sun” Mr. Cruz likes to say, which also applies to his campaign style. Stump speeches aren’t meant for binge eating, and all politicians have their set pieces that each crowd of voters is hearing fresh. What’s remarkable about Mr. Cruz’s discipline is that he repeats the same sentences and fully formed paragraphs.
Check the tapes, and he promises to “finally, finally, finally” secure the borders—three finallys every time. He’ll “abolish” the Internal Revenue Service, “rip to shreds this catastrophic Iranian nuclear deal,” repeal “every word” of ObamaCare, adopt a “simple flat tax,” halt President Obama’s “illegal executive amnesty.” The overall effect of a Cruz event is of a slick but well-rehearsed and workmanlike broadcaster, Jay Leno maybe.
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Mr. Cruz’s campaign declined an interview request, citing his congested schedule, and no doubt it was. Still, full disclosure, the senator seems to view the Journal editorial page as the house organ for the establishment. “Of all the friendly media outlets for GOP leadership, none is more potent,” Mr. Cruz writes in the first chapter—titled “Mendacity”—of his 2015 memoir, which recounts “the weapons used against me—mischaracterizations of my motivations, attacks in the press, efforts at ostracism.”
As Mr. Cruz emphatically puts it in Rye, Exeter, Hollis and Manchester: “If you think Washington is fundamentally broken, that there is a bipartisan corruption of career politicians in both parties that get in bed with the lobbyists and special interests and grow and grow and grow government, and we need to take power out of Washington, and back to ‘We the People,’ that is what this campaign is all about.”
Mr. Cruz’s project for 2016 is predicated on a severe claim about the condition of American democracy. Captured by the Washington cartel, the Republican Party is not merely feckless, but, worse, corrupt, and it has become detached from the public to which it is supposed to be accountable.
“Our representatives aren’t representing us. They’re representing large corporations and lobbyists rather than the American people,” Mr. Cruz declared at the Heritage Foundation last June. The “Republican leadership,” he said in a Senate floor speech in September, “will not fight for a single priority we promised the voters we would fight for when we were campaigning less than a year ago.”
He didn’t get the opportunity to finish the thought. When Mr. Cruz’s allotted time expired, not a single colleague supported the procedural motion to extend the hour as a courtesy. “Both the Democratic and Republican leadership are objecting to the American people speaking further,” he concluded.
Mr. Cruz’s critics on Capitol Hill believe he converts differences over strategy into crucibles of purity and principles, and then goes on to assail his opponents as dishonest, illegitimate or motivated by bad faith. Thus he says GOP leaders opposed the 2013 ObamaCare shutdown because they were closet supporters of the entitlement, not because they thought the tactic was futile and would mislead voters about what was politically possible.
In a word, they think he is a supremely self-absorbed show pony. Perhaps relevant: The Ted Cruz 2016 pocket Constitution that his volunteers distribute features a Ted Cruz introduction and a Ted Cruz chrestomathy before the document’s text.
Whatever Mr. Cruz’s motives, his Senate capers seem to be an asset. “In this Republican primary, every Republican says they will take on Washington,” he observes. “Have you noticed that, by the way, in Republican primary, everyone says they’re a conservative? You know, on that debate stage you don’t have a single person stand up there and say, ‘I’m a squishy establishment moderate. I stand for nothing.’ They don’t say that.” (Except for John Kasich.)
“Well, the natural follow-up question is, ‘OK, when have you stood up to Washington?’ Who has taken on Washington, not just Democrats but leaders in our own party?” Mr. Cruz continues. “Because if we’re going to stop the cronyism, the corporate welfare, you’ve got to be willing to stand up to the lobbyists, and stand up to the Washington cartel. And I would suggest, in that regard, my record is materially different from anyone else on that stage.”
One irony is that notwithstanding his reputation, Mr. Cruz tends to nurture a careful strategic indefiniteness about his positions. Last April he published an op-ed in this newspaper with now-Speaker Paul Ryan endorsing fast-track trade legislation, only to turn against the bill for procedural reasons—and after Mr. Trump did. He led the opposition to Mr. Obama’s drone program and Syrian bombing plan three years ago; now he says he’ll make the sand glow to defeat Islamic State.
Mr. Cruz has also executed subtle shifts on immigration and the best approach to oppose gun control, while maintaining, with a lawyer’s exactitude, that he was consistent all along. Like most politicians, he has a talent for reinvention: He’s a purist, in other words, who doesn’t always think, talk or behave like a purist.
Mr. Cruz is fond of drawing historical analogies and offering “a bit of history the media will never tell you,” often having to do with Ronald Reagan. But he can be a revisionist historian.
“Republican leadership loathed Ronald Reagan,” Mr. Cruz explained in Hollis. “They hated him with the heat of a thousand white-hot suns. You think they dislike me. It wasn’t nothin’ compared to how they felt about Ronald Reagan. Now: ’77, ’78, ’79, Reagan didn’t fly out to D.C. and sit down with the old bulls and say, ‘Come on guys, we got to stand for something.’ He knew that was hopeless. They weren’t listening. . . . Instead, he built a grass-roots movement. That tidal wave came in and it changed Washington.”
Well, that was true before the 1976 GOP convention, when Reagan attempted to unhorse a sitting president from his own party. But the well-liked two-term California governor was the odds-on favorite before the 1980 primary. As a concession to the party’s establishment, the Gipper even put a Bush on the ticket.
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Mr. Cruz’s most spectacular volte-face is on Donald Trump. For months he slipstreamed behind the billionaire, praising his “brash” frankness and validating his supposed conservative bona fides. Once Mr. Trump started to attack Mr. Cruz as he crept up in Iowa, the senator became Dr. Moreau.
“The Washington establishment is rushing over to support Donald Trump,” Mr. Cruz told reporters in Hollis, lambasting the businessman as the “deal-maker” he says he is. “The Washington establishment knows who’s going to keep the gravy train going, who’s going to keep cutting the deals and growing government. . . . He’ll go and cut a deal with Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, and those deals—he’ll do exactly what John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have done.”
Mr. Cruz is convinced he can defeat this establishment, whatever it is, not least because of his abiding faith in the power of democratic indignation—just as “millions of men and women rose up and became the Reagan revolution,” as he put it in Exeter. “If we stand together, if we stand as one, if we defend freedom, if we defend the Constitution, if we defend the Judeo-Christian values on which this country was built, if we stand as one, as ‘We the People,’ then we will bring back, we will restore, that last best hope for mankind, that shining city on a hill, that is the United States of America.”
A supporter asked him how he thought he could win the election. “We don’t do what the Washington consultants tell us every time,” Mr. Cruz replied. “They always say the way you win is you run to the middle, you run to the mushy middle, you blur the distinctions, you run as Democrat-lite. And every time we do that, we lose. . . .
“What’s abundantly clear is that if we nominate another candidate in the mold of a Bob Dole or a John McCain or a Mitt Romney—all of whom are good, honorable, decent men, they love their country—but what they did didn’t work. We got to do something different. I think the way we win—I think 2016 is like 1980. I think we win by following Reagan’s admonition to paint in bold colors, not pale pastels.”
One question is how well Mr. Cruz’s polarizing methods will wear in the pastel regions of the U.S. that will decide the election. Even in New Hampshire, the second most secular state, he asks the audience to pray for the country every day, appealing to 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear their prayers, and forgive their sins, and I will heal their land.”
Another question, for students of history, is whether the modern GOP cartel really has cornered the political market. The establishment Republicans of the Reagan era weren’t moderates but through-and-through liberals, like Nelson Rockefeller and Lowell Weicker. Today they’d be Democrats.
The old order in politics is always dissolving, to be replaced by a new order that will grow old itself and dissolve in time. Mr. Cruz’s campaign may not be exposing the dissolution of the establishment so much as its nonexistence. That’s democracy.
Mr. Rago is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
