That skill surely came in handy when he ran for a Senate seat in 2012 and saw that the best lane available to him was marked Tea Party. He became the Tea Party incarnate, turning Washington into a four-letter word: a four-letter word, mind you, that he couldn’t wait to make his second home and use as a stage upon which to strut and preen.

HIS greatest distinction as a lawmaker thus far has been his readiness to pursue lost causes that draw attention from a news media that he supposedly loathes, and to skirmish with party colleagues in a way that similarly puts him front and center on TV and prompts headlines about him.

His storytelling is selective. He talks voluminously about his father’s arrival in Texas from Cuba, presenting a harrowing, inspiring immigration narrative that’s probably not the full truth and glides over many oddities and unanswered questions.

He talks less voluminously about his mother and about Canada, which is where she gave birth to him. She’d grown up in Delaware — not exactly the prairie — and gone to college at Rice University, which is sometimes referred to as the Harvard of the South. Not only that, she majored in mathematics. That was hardly the norm for a woman in the 1950s, and it suggests a certain sophistication, even progressiveness.

He emphatically recalls how his father’s embrace of Jesus Christ led him back to his mother — and to him — after his parents had separated.

He tends to skip over the part about his parents eventually divorcing nonetheless. It was his father’s second failed marriage. That detail doesn’t fit Cruz’s moralizing on the subject of holy matrimony. It doesn’t buttress his extravagant lamentations about the tradition-shattering, God-insulting unions of two men or two women.

But then his education and his station in life don’t exactly buttress the disdain he heaps on intellectuals and the affinity he claims with the hourly laborers of the world.