Careful calculation behind ‘regular guy’ Ted Cruz

Calculation behind ‘regular guy’

I cannot imagine Ted Cruz as president of the United States. Despite his emphatic defeat of Donald Trump in the Wisconsin primary. Despite the ever-louder chorus of voices saying he is the only man who can deny Trump the Republican nomination.

I vividly remember our first meeting. Cruz is six years younger than me but seemed six years older. He is a quick-witted conversationalist, yet something put me off. Though his words conveyed a worldly cynicism, his eyes were somewhere else. Brown, with long dark lashes, they are oddly feminine. I felt I had seen them somewhere before. I had. Oh god. Joe McCarthy, infamous for his anti-communist 1950s witch-hunt.

It used to be said that converts to Catholicism were plus catholique que le pape. There is something about Cruz that is more American than America. That should not surprise us. Born Rafael Edward Cruz in Calgary, Canada, to a Cuban and an Irish-Italian-American, Ted Cruz is only just a “natural-born citizen”, as the constitution requires all presidents to be. He was (unwittingly, he says) a dual Canadian-American citizen until 2014. “I’m Cuban, Irish and Italian,” he jokes, “yet somehow I ended up Southern Baptist.”

Cruz’s ultra-conservative Texan persona seems designed to belie his cosmopolitan origins.

“I don’t want to use the word phony,” said my friend Tony, a one-man Republican focus group. “But he reminds me of a circus ringmaster.”

Dead right. When Cruz speaks, you hear the echo of showman PT Barnum. He parades new policies bumptiously, the way Barnum used to exhibit his mermaids and dwarfs. To Barnum is attributed the line, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” When I hear Cruz outlining his plan for a flat tax, I see those words in a thought bubble above his head.

One reason for this not-quite-but-very-nearly-phony quality is that Cruz is a highly intelligent man pretending to be a regular guy. What you get is a skilled debater’s idea of a regular guy. The winner of the 1992 North American debating competition and a semifinalist in the 1995 world championship, Cruz relates to the rest of humanity as if we are all on the other side of an invisible dispatch box.

Everyone who went to university had a Ted in their class. You remember him, don’t you? The prematurely middle-aged pain-in-the-neck who came top in every test. The man whose voice was always just two notches too loud. The committed conservative at an age when normal students are in search of placards and barricades.

Right now Cruz is the second most hated man in the Republican Party establishment and the second most popular candidate to be that same party’s presidential nominee. How to explain this paradox? It’s actually quite easy.

Senator Cruz has missed a remarkable number of committee hearings and rollcall votes. In 2013 he inflicted a 21-hour filibuster — the nadir of which was a reading from Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham — that never stood a chance of killing Barack Obama’s healthcare reform. Two years later he accused Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of being a liar. All of this, in the words of veteran senator John McCain, was “outside the realm of Senate behaviour”.

But in the eyes of an electorate that has a very low opinion indeed of the nation’s politicians, Cruz’s attacks on the “cartel” that controls congress are rather appealing. When he lambasts his colleagues as the “surrender caucus”, millions of ordinary Americans who dislike Obamacare are inclined to cheer.

The point is that every aspect of Cruz’s obnoxious behaviour has been calculated carefully. I don’t believe for one second that a man educated at Princeton and Harvard seriously thinks that a US president can abolish the Internal Revenue Service, levy only a flat tax, drastically restrict abortion and immigration, and dismiss the risk of man-made climate change. Cruz adopts these positions, I am sure, not because he believes a word of them but because they suit his purposes.

Like Trump, Cruz saw the extent to which Republican voters were sick of their party establishment. Like Trump, Cruz went after liberals, proponents of “planned parenthood”, environmentalists and every other bete noire of the party’s base. Like Trump, too, he opposed further US intervention in the Middle East.

The difference was that, unlike Trump, Cruz didn’t make it up as he went along. Trump was engaged in what is known on the New York comedy scene as improv. Nothing Cruz does is improv. He is always the master of his brief. It was Cruz who assembled George W. Bush’s legal team after the 2000 election in Florida was too close to call. It was Cruz who, as solicitor-general of Texas, argued before the Supreme Court nine times, winning five out of nine cases.

Nearly everyone has underestimated this man. Back in October, prediction markets said he had a 4 per cent chance of winning the Republican nomination. Today that figure is 33 per cent. The man is a politics machine. Thus far, in the primaries and caucuses, he has won Iowa, Texas, Alaska, Kansas, Maine, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Wisconsin and Colorado. OK, so he lost New York. That is Trump’s territory, so no surprises there. His total number of delegates to date is 545, not far behind Trump’s 743 and a long way ahead of John Kasich (143).

To deny Trump the 1237 delegates required to win the nomination on the first ballot, according to John McCormack of The Weekly Standard, Cruz needs to beat Trump in Indiana and in Nebraska, split the delegates in Oregon and Washington, then beat Trump again in South Dakota, Montana and California. If he can pull this off, we shall see the first open convention in the Republican Party’s history since 1976 — meaning that there will not be a winner after the first round of voting by the convention delegates.

Under the party’s Alice in Wonderland rules, fewer than 200 of the 2472 delegates are “unbound” in the first round of voting.

If that is inconclusive, however, the contest becomes a free-for-all, with all delegates empowered to switch their votes as they see fit. As most delegates are keen conservatives, Cruz may win in the second round. Or the third. However many it takes to get a winner.

There is a lot of wild talk in Washington these days about “white knights” riding to the rescue at the convention. The names of Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan — now house Speaker — are bandied about. Ryan has ruled out a bid and I doubt very much anyone would want to accept a nomination so flagrantly at odds with the wishes of the primary and caucus voters. By contrast, if Cruz arrives in Cleveland running a close second behind Trump, he is the likeliest nominee.

No analogy is exact, but consider this. In May 1860 the Republican National Convention in Chicago was expected to nominate New York senator William H. Seward. Few people reckoned with an unprepossessing but gifted lawyer and debater named Abraham Lincoln. He won on the third ballot.

Now, I am not saying Cruz is Lincoln. I am just saying that, on reflection, maybe I can imagine him as US president.

The Sunday Times

Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford.