Ted Cruz always thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. Jason Zengerle wrote in GQ that the senator from Texas "has come to the reluctant but unavoidable conclusion that he is simply more intelligent, more principled, more right—in both senses of the word—than pretty much everyone else in our nation's capital." A roommate from Harvard Law School said Cruz announced he'd only study with students who'd graduated from Harvard, Yale or (like he did) Princeton.

New Jersey's Gov. Chris Christie graduated from the University of Delaware, and got his law degree at Seton Hall. I'll bet Christie thinks he's pretty smart too, whatever Sen. Cruz thinks of his pedigree. In recent days we've seen these two men, two of the leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, take diametrically opposed paths in doing their respective jobs.

Earlier in the week, Christie threw in the towel in his fight against marriage equality in New Jersey. The State Supreme Court had issued a unanimous ruling that allowed same-sex marriages to go forward while waiting to hear the Christie administration's appeal, and stated therein that the appeal had little “reasonable probability of success.” Christie then decided to drop the appeal (one aide called it a "fool's errand"), and the fight was over.

Let's compare how Christie handled this matter to the Ted Cruz-led strategy carried out by tea party Republicans in Congress, a strategy that led to a two-week long government shutdown, threatened to force a default on our national debt obligations, and which cost our country, according to Standard & Poor's, about $25 billion. Remember, the goal of the shutdown and the default threat was to blackmail President Obama into defunding his signature legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

No one outside the right-wing echo chamber thought that strategy offered a “reasonable probability of success.” One Republican senator called it "the dumbest idea I've ever heard." Did that convince Cruz it was a "fool's errand"? An internal memo produced by Cruz's Senate office after the government reopened provides your answer:

“The defund plan produced tangible results that create both immediate and long-term benefits for the country and the conservative cause.”

That must be some echo chamber.

More on this clash of Republican titans below the fold: