If you listened much to Ted Cruz over these last furious months, you heard him talk frequently about “the abyss”, as in what this county was teetering on the edge of. If you listened to him over these last furious hours, you heard him mention the “yawning cavern of insecurity” that motivates Donald Trump and other bullies.
Cruz should take up spelunking (caving). He’s obviously fascinated by unfathomable depths, and with his loss in Indiana on Tuesday, his candidacy for the presidency was finished, giving him a whole lot of extra time. A new hobby is definitely in order.
As we bid Cruz adieu, we should give him his due: He took a mien spectacularly ill suited to the art of seducing voters about as far as it could go. He outlasted the likes of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. He outperformed Rick Santorum in 2012 and Mike Huckabee in 2008.
Like him, Santorum and Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses and built from there, courting the religious right with particular fervour. But they lacked the intensity of Cruz’s professed disdain for Washington, which was his other big sales pitch, made at its moment of maximum potency. He peddled extravagant piety and extreme contempt in equal measure.
If that sounds paradoxical, it is, and the tension between contradictory Cruzes is what ultimately did him in.
He spoke out of both sides of his scowl, itching to be the voice of the common man but equally eager to demonstrate what a highfalutin, Harvard-trained intellect he possessed. He wed a populist message to a plummy vocabulary. And while the line separating smart and smart aleck isn’t all that thin or blurry, he never could stay on the winning side of it. He wore cowboy boots, but his favourites are made of ostrich.
Friendly position
Two peacocks in a pod, he and Trump, and what ghastly plumage they showed on Tuesday. Trump somehow saw fit to bring up a National Enquirer story linking Cruz’s father to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Cruz exploded, branding Trump a “pathological liar” and “serial philanderer”. He also brought up an interview from many years ago in which Trump told Howard Stern that his effort to steer clear of sexually transmitted diseases was his “personal Vietnam”.
Where was this rant six months ago, when the Republican field was crowded and Cruz played footsie with Trump? Back then he was wagering that Trump would fade, and he wanted to be in a friendly position to inherit the billionaire’s supporters. But by Tuesday, Trump was the main obstacle between Cruz and the Republican presidential nomination, and Cruz had just one true compass: His own advancement.
The nakedness of his vanity and transparency of his ambition were always his biggest problem. He routinely excoriated other politicians for self-centredness while repeatedly hogging centre stage, his remarks interminable — after his Iowa victory, for example, or when he presumptuously introduced Carly Fiorina as his running mate — and his pauses so theatrically drawn out that you could watch the entirety of The Revenant during some of them.
Excuse for losing
He trashed “the establishment” and wore its rejection of him as a badge of honour only until it stopped rejecting him and its help was his best hope to wrest the nomination from Trump. At that point he did dizzy cartwheels over every prominent endorsement that came his way.
He took great pride in an adversarial relationship with the media, decreeing us irrelevant, until he went in hunt of a fresh excuse for losing to Trump and decided over the last few days that it was all our fault. We didn’t matter and then we did, depending on which estimation flattered him.
He purported to be more high-minded than his peers but pettily mocked Michelle Obama for urging schoolchildren to eat leafy greens. When Heidi Cruz is first lady, he pledged, “French fries are coming back to the cafeteria”. Heidi is not going to be first lady, so she’ll need some other platform for the promotion of calorie bombs and second chins.
And where in her husband was the humility that a Christian faith as frequently proclaimed as his should encompass? It wasn’t evident when he stormed into the Senate in early 2013, an upstart intent on upstaging the veterans.
Last Tuesday, he called Trump “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen”. Yes, America has, and so has he, every day, in the mirror.
That’s why he’ll undoubtedly be back to try for the presidency again. But this bid is moribund. It’s time for Cruz to rest in peevishness.
— New York times News Service
Frank Bruni is a writer and author of Born Round and Ambling Into History.
