Over the course of his brief, polarizing career in electoral politics, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has been called many names, especially by liberals. “Dirty Syrup Guzzler” (Jon Stewart). “Creature from the Nether Regions” (Cher). “The Most Dangerous Canadian in America” (the Huffington Post).
Yet so far the most indelible description of Cruz has come from a fellow conservative. In 2013, when Cruz decided to protest U.S. drone policy by filibustering the nomination of incoming CIA chief John Brennan, John McCain told reporter Jon Ward — now a senior political correspondent for Yahoo News — that his junior colleague was a “wacko bird.”
The sobriquet stuck. It was emblazoned on T-shirts. It appeared in countless headlines. Cruz himself proudly displays a black WACKO BIRD baseball cap with a picture of Daffy Duck on it in his Senate office.
By using that particular moniker, McCain was, in effect, dismissing Cruz as both flighty and crazy. And for the most part that is exactly how the Texan has been characterized in both the press and the public imagination since he alighted on Washington, D.C., nearly three years ago and immediately set about trolling his fellow Republicans and hijacking the legislative process: as an irresponsible far-right demagogue prone to behave in irrational, counterproductive ways. Cruz’s showy obstructionism suffers from “basic logic problems” and “just doesn’t make sense,” wrote the Atlantic’s Molly Ball in 2013. “Zealot leaders” like Cruz “forget that the key to leadership is essentially getting results by moving agendas ahead,” added Inc. magazine.
Many pundits were skeptical when, in a speech at Virginia’s evangelical Liberty University on March 23 , Cruz became the first Republican to announce he was entering the 2016 presidential race. As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn put it at the time, “The most interesting question about Mr. Cruz’s candidacy is whether he has a very small chance to win or no chance at all.”
But suddenly it seems that Cruz is running what even Dan Pfeiffer, a former top aide to President Obama, concedes is “the best campaign on the other side.” He has raised more money than any Republican other than Jeb Bush and more non-PAC money than any other Republican, period; he also has more cash on hand than any of his GOP rivals. He was the first candidate to recruit chairmen in all 171 counties in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. He is only candidate who for months has been consistently calling and sending surrogates to all five U.S. territories — Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Virgin Islands — in order to secure extra delegates who could prove decisive down the road. (More on that later.)
He is doing more than any other Republican to prepare for the so-called “SEC primary,” a new Southern voting blitz set to take place on March 1; he has already enlisted more than 100 countywide campaign directors and 1,500 volunteers in Georgia alone. And from the start he has conspicuously refrained from criticizing frontrunner Donald Trump, choosing instead to position himself as Trump’s heir apparent, should the bombastic real estate mogul falter or fade, which Cruz has publicly predicted will happen.
