In Iowa, among evangelicals and renegade Republicans, Ted Cruz is storming to a caucus victory. In Washington, people take an instant dislike to him because it ‘saves time’. Will the White House be a miracle too far?

Ted Cruz reaches the dramatic climax of his pitch to voters with a flourish that is as subtle as it is selfless. After asking them to vote, he also asks them to pray. Every day, between now and the Iowa caucuses in just three weeks. And not just for victory, but for salvation.



Donald Trump revives 'birther' views in attack on fellow Republican Ted Cruz Read more

“Father God please keep this awakening growing,” he told a devoted crowd at the Praise Community church in Mason City on Friday. “Keep this revival growing. Awaken the body of Christ that we might rise up to pull this country back from the abyss.”

Standing in front of a distressed wooden crucifix, flanked by an electronic drum kit and keyboard, the Texas senator is not just the candidate most likely to save the country from a Donald Trump nomination. He is the savior of an exceptional and divinely ordained nation, brought to the precipice of the Obama abyss.

When the chorus of amens dies down, Cruz takes his flock to an ecstatic finale by casting himself in the starring role of the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan. He solemnly raises his right hand and places his left hand on an imaginary Bible, as he re-enacts the 1981 inauguration, with the holy book open at the same page from Second Chronicles.

“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves in prayer and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways,” he intones, along with his audience, “then I will hear their prayers, and will forgive their sins and I will heal their land.”

He stretches his lips across his teeth into a forced smile, as his congregation gives him the third standing ovation of the morning. (The first two having been for his promises to destroy Isis and mount some kind of insurrection in Washington.)

Nobody votes for a self-effacing candidate. But Cruz’s aura of smug sanctimony, like his lack of humility, is striking even in an age of Trumpery.

After several months of some kind of mutual non-aggression pact, Trump finally turned on Cruz last week by questioning his status as a natural-born citizen who is constitutionally eligible to serve as president. Cruz, who was born in Canada to an American mother and Cuban father, merely chuckled at the attack as confirmation of his political status.

Today just about every Republican in the field is attacking me. That suggests this race has changed Ted Cruz

“Three weeks ago, just about every Republican in the field was attacking Donald Trump on a non-stop basis,” he told reporters in a frigid airport hangar in Webster City, Iowa. “Today just about every Republican in the field is attacking me. That suggests the dynamics of this race has changed.”

For his campaign, the dynamics of the race roll along two-lane roads through snow-crusted cornfields. On an exhaustive six-day bus tour, the first-term Texas senator is – in the words of his campaign – Cruzin’ to Caucus.

It is unclear why his otherwise crack political team has picked up this particular pun. Perhaps they enjoyed the schlocky movie where Al Pacino is an undercover cop tracking down a homicidal homophobe in the gay bars of 1970s New York. Or maybe they were thinking of the smoochy Smokey Robinson number where he’s cruisin’ together with his baby.

It would have made more sense had they stuck to the language that drips from the candidate like so many souvenirs at Lourdes.

Judging from the polls, he is Cruzifyin’ to victory in the first presidential contest. And if Trump collapses under the weight of his own hairdo, the senator might just be Cruzadin’ to the nomination – and almost certain defeat in the general election.

Rafael Edward Cruz is shrewd enough to build his campaign on more than just an evangelical sermon or two. He rails against illegal immigration, against the “bipartisan corruption” of what he calls the Washington cartel, and against government regulation.

He picks and chooses his red meat from all corners of the conservative menu: a libertarian dream to return to the gold standard, a nativist drive to end sanctuary cities, a business goal to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, a home-schooler’s hatred of Common Core education standards, a John Birch conspiracy theory against the world.

This leads to some glaring inconsistencies. It is hard to be pro-business but also want to issue currency in line with the value of gold bars. It is hard to win Iowa farming votes while opposing all subsidies, including those for corn-based ethanol.

He is far stronger when he stops talking policy and wraps himself in the flag. Or wraps the flag in the Turin shroud and settles in for a good night of prayer.

In the Church of Cruz, American exceptionalism is being destroyed by same-sex marriage, the persecution of Christians, Planned Parenthood and Obamacare. In particular, jihadis are terrorizing Americans either with the prior knowledge of the Obama administration, or thanks to its complete incompetence.

For his followers, the links are obvious, and the threats are everywhere. One questioner in Webster City asked the candidate about the Trilateral Commission conspiracy to rule the world; Cruz answered by bragging about a case where he struck a blow against the international court of justice in the case of a particularly brutal Mexican rapist and murderer. The two have nothing to do with one another, but that’s not the point. This is a broad church of believers in America’s more obscure enemies.

Another voter asked about an attempted beheading – in sleepy downtown Des Moines – of a Muslim woman who wanted to remove her burqa. The questioner appeared to refer to a domestic dispute in 2010, but no matter. He asked Cruz if he would ban sharia law in the United States, and mercifully the senator said he would.

This is the Texasification of American politics: a process that started with the previous governor, Rick Perry, but ended up with the current wing-nut extremism of Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott was previously the state’s attorney general, and he hired Cruz to be his solicitor general as they took their constitutional arguments across the country. One of their landmark victories was to defend a monument of the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol.

Abbott this week proposed a new constitutional convention to add nine amendments to the supreme law of the land, to curb the power of the federal government and the supreme court itself.

This kind of politics makes the last Texas president look like a bleeding-heart liberal and international statesman. In place of George W Bush’s compassionate conservatism, Cruz and his allies lament the way that compassion can interfere with the law.

I think he’s really fighting the battles not just against the Democrats, but against the Republican party as well Pastor Jeff Dahlin, Praise church, Mason City

Cruz traveled on his bus tour with Representative Steve King, the Iowa congressman famous for suggesting that undocumented immigrants have “got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75lbs of marijuana across the desert”. King has a similarly buffoon-like quality on stage as he does in interviews. Whenever Cruz praised him for his hardline position against immigration, King mugged for the crowd by pointing to himself, grinning, and giving himself two thumbs up.

In church this week, King said that although he loved Reagan, he was angry that the president had signed a 1986 amnesty law for illegal immigrants. He expected the president to know that “the rule of law was more important than our compassion”.

The lack of feeling tends to go both ways in today’s Republican party. There is an unkind joke among Cruz’s colleagues on Capitol Hill: why do so many people take an instant dislike to him? Because it saves time.

The butt of the joke takes pride in this kind of rejection. Cruz cares not that his fellow Republicans hate him for engineering a government shutdown in 2013 over yet another failed attempt to defund Obamacare. That shutdown was opposed by 81% of the American people, but Cruz – whose marathon Senate speech included a reading of Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss – believes it set the stage for the bigger victories to come.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman holds a copy of a book by Cruz, as she listens to him speak in Mason City. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

Ted Cruz's father inspires 'ambassadors for Christ' at religious freedom revival Read more

Cruz is shrewd enough to have built a best-in-class campaign in Iowa, and nationally, with every interaction underscoring his brand of firebrand politics. After all, his campaign logo is a ball of fire in stars and stripes, underscoring a slogan about Courageous Conservatives Reigniting the Promise of America.

When Cruz emails you for money, he doesn’t just tell you to give him your credit card details. He asks instead for a quickie sacrifice. “Running for president of the United States has been a HUGE sacrifice,” he recently wrote his fellow conservatives, before urging them to make their own sacrifices. “To make it as quick and easy as possible, I’ve asked my staff to put together the secure links below so you can make an instant, secure sacrificial gift – it can be done in five minutes or less.”

At the Praise church in Mason City, pastor Jeff Dahlin (hobbies: cooking, reading, stained glass art, and hunting) sounded like there was nothing quick or easy about Cruz.

The pastor liked his faith, but he loved his fight. “I like Ted Cruz because I think he’s really fighting the battles not just against the Democrats, but against the Republican party as well,” he said after the Cruz town hall. “I haven’t seen that with the other candidates. I am very frustrated with the party. They campaign on promises and then don’t do what they said they would do.”

Cruz may not have passed any legislation but he can say he kept his promise to frustrate the establishment. The Cruz conundrum is whether a candidate can successfully run against his own party and still win its nomination.

Among the communities of faith in Iowa, that may be possible. But it would be another kind of miracle for the Gospel according to Cruz to spread across the nation.