Ted Cruz: loose cannon or libertarian reformer? The Texas senator might be just crazy enough to win the GOP presidential nomination.

• Author: Garvin, Glenn
• Position: Cover story

As they used to say in the old westerns, it was quiet out there--too quiet. So no one was really surprised when Ted Cruz announced to The Washington Post the weekend before the November election that his brief flirtation with civilized behavior was nearing its end.

For months, the Texas senator had abandoned his "the guy with dynamite strapped to his chest" persona, as one Republican political strategist describes it, to be a team player, crisscrossing the country to campaign for GOP candidates. No filibusters on the Senate floor to hold the federal budget hostage to the repeal of Obamacare; no fundraising letters on behalf of Tea Party insurgents seeking to knock off what Cruz likes to call "squishy" Republican incumbents.

But secure in the knowledge that private tracking polls showed a Republican landslide on the way, Cruz unchained his not-so-inner werewolf. The first thing on the agenda for the new, Republican-led Senate, he said, should be hearings on President Barack Obama's "abuse of power, the executive abuse, the regulatory abuse, the lawlessness that sadly has pervaded his administration." To break up the monotony, Cruz added, the Senate will mount a human-wave attack against Obamacare, voting to repeal the whole thing and then, when the president vetoes their measure, attacking the law one provision at a time, forcing another 10 or 20 or a hundred or a thousand vetoes.

To much of official Washington and its media courtiers, this sounds like insanity. As one of Trent Lott's former staffers told the Post, Cruz "will certainly get the base jazzed up about what he's doing, but he won't get rid of the law."

If you're a presidential candidate, though, getting the base jazzed up is the whole point. The same weekend that Cruz announced his return to the warpath, The Des Moines Register published a poll showing that the single biggest issue motivating voters who supported Iowa state Sen. Joni Ernst (a Republican who a couple of days later would win an upset victory in her race for the U.S. Senate) was, by a large margin, "to get one step closer to repealing Obamacare." Iowa also happens to be the site of the first 2016 presidential caucus. The man with the dynamite strapped to his chest will be there, and what explodes may be the chattering-class perception that Ted Cruz is too crazy to be considered a serious candidate for president.

Can a Wacko Bird Be Crazy Like a Fox?

Two and a half years ago, before Ted Cruz had even been elected to the Senate--when he was still just a couple of months past being, as he likes to joke, a candidate with 2 percent of the vote in polls with a 3 percent margin of error--the Republican strategist Mark McKinnon wrote an extraordinarily prescient piece calling Cruz "the Republican Barack Obama."

"A young, Harvard-educated lawyer, an intellectual with a compelling life story, the son of an American mother and an immigrant father, a practiced orator thrust into the national political spotlight, and buoyed by a cult of personality," McKinnon described him, hitting only one wrong note: "He'll have to pivot a bit to the middle while not stepping on the toes of those who brung 'em to the dance."

If Cruz pivoted, it was on an arc so tiny that it exists only in theoretical physics. More than a month before he took his seat, he was already squaring off against the Senate's Republican establishment and winning. Invited to a Senate Republican caucus lunch, he was dismayed to learn the party was going to back the U.N. Treaty on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities at the behest of tribal elders such as Bob Dole and Richard Thornburgh.

Wow, said Cruz, voters hate it when they think U.S. laws are going to be usurped by meddling U.N. bureaucrats, especially on stuff like abortion and homeschooling. He got to work. By the time dessert came around, party leaders were being confronted with mass defections, the treaty was headed for defeat, and Cruz had earned the undying enmity of much of the Republican leadership--most notably John McCain, who would later label Cruz a "wacko bird." Which, apparently, is the PG version of the epithets McCain uses in private. "He fucking hates Cruz," a McCain aide later told Gig,

The wacko bird...