Ted Cruz: The Most Interesting Presidential Debater

Last updated on: August 4, 2015 at 2:45 pm by Jeremy Neill

Ted Cruz: The Most Interesting Presidential Debater 2015-08-04T14:45:20-06:00 Jeremy Neill

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A lot of people are fixated on Donald Trump going into the first Republican Presidential debate. I’m actually more interested in another candidate – Ted Cruz – because I think he’s going to make a more intriguing debater.

Flannery O’Connor, a conservative Catholic, explained in “The Fiction Writer and His Country” why she wrote such grotesque stories: “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” O’Connor, unwittingly, was speaking of Ted Cruz’s rhetorical style: Cruz, believing his fellow citizens to be almost-deaf and almost-blind, revels today in startling pronouncements. Having grown up in Ted Cruz’s world – Baptist roots, homeschooled by Texas evangelicals – I find it easy to get inside the man’s mind. Going into the first debate, here are what I take to be some key facts and fictions about him.

1. Ted Cruz is self-centered, ambitious, and convinced he can win. I think this one’s a fact – Cruz is driven (maybe even arrogant), he thinks he’s right, and he has a burning desire to be at the center of the political conversation. But I am not convinced that the win that Cruz thinks he can get is the office of the Presidency. In an era in which the habit of our political officeholders is to rush to their pollsters before every decision, Cruz knows that winning means shaping the conversation – and not necessarily holding the office itself. This is why I think that the guy will make such an interesting debater: the election is a victory for team Cruz if they get us to pay attention to their worldview. And Cruz, as a Latino and a conservative from Texas, knows that a failed Presidential bid is not the end of the line.

2. Cruz’s interest in dismantling the IRS is merely a campaign promise. I think this one is a half-fiction. Cruz convinced his wife to gamble their entire fortune of just over $1 Million on his Senate race, at a time when he was trailing badly in the polls. As an American President, he might go for broke. True, his advisors would say “do you want to be a one-term President or a two-term President?” Cruz would then compromise. But a compromise for Cruz would mean something different than it does for others: merely settling for a gutted and rehabbed IRS, maybe. Fortunately for IRS backers, Washington is now so dysfunctional that American Presidents can no longer bring about large-scale governance changes.

3. Cruz would be formidable in presidential debates. As mentioned, I think this one’s a fact. Alan Dershowitz, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, described Cruz as “off-the-chart brilliant.” The man has prepared his entire life for this and would be out for blood. When Scott Walker was at IBM and doing marketing for the Red Cross, Cruz was researching Con Law with Robert George at Princeton and envisioning himself as the second coming of James Madison. The upside for Walker and the other Republican hopefuls is that fewer Americans are now watching the presidential debates.

4. A Ted Cruz presidency would destabilize the Middle East. I think this one’s probably a fiction. Lyndon Johnson famously defeated Barry Goldwater by suggesting through his ‘Daisy’ TV ad that a Goldwater election could lead to nuclear war. But Cruz has a lot more affinity with Middle Eastern Muslims than Goldwater had with the Soviets. As a Texas evangelical, Cruz often feels his worldview to be closer to that of conservative Muslims than to that of American liberals. The Muslims, he thinks, are struggling alongside him against leftist sexual politics. His respect for their worldview would almost certainly equip him in foreign relations – with Iran, with the Kurds, with the House of Saud. True, many Texas Christians are loud Israel supporters. But at the end of the day when it comes to cultural morals a lot of them are closer to conservative Muslims than they are to the liberals in their own denominations. In Cruz’s mind, America is a cancerous patient and the tumor must be removed. More dangers are within the body politic than outside it.

I’m not necessarily a Cruz supporter (he comes across, at least, as arrogant), and I’m also not convinced that Cruz can win the Republican nomination (I think he’s too far to the right for the party’s business class). But I do think he’ll make the debate ride interesting.

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