TED CRUZ, the fiercely conservative Texan already flirting with a White House run less than a year after being elected to the Senate, does a surprisingly good impersonation of a five-year-old girl bored by politics. That is a tricky impression for a middle-aged politician in a suit to pull off: the risks of seeming creepy or odd are high. But Mr Cruz takes risks for a reason. He is an unusually talented political speaker and he knows it, Lexington can report, after watching the senator perform on August 10th at a summit for conservative Christians in Ames, Iowa. On paper the freshman senator is too far to the right to stand a chance of winning a national race in a country where neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have enough diehard voters to carry a candidate for the White House across the winning line. In person he did not back away from his fire-breathing conservative reputation, outlining a platform of a blood-red, take-no-prisoners purity to the crowd, who had spent all day waiting for the Texan.

Yet, leaving the content of those policies to one side (this is a blog posting from the field, not a finished article about Mr Cruz’s agenda), he is a skilled retail politician—easily as skilled as some of his putative rivals.

He brings some tricky personal attributes to the contest. He is a populist with an elite education (Princeton and Harvard Law School). His image in Washington is that of an angry ideological warrior, who treats older members, and in particular women members of the Senate with patronising disrespect.

Mr Cruz knows that he needs to be charming. He bounded on stage at the Iowa State University auditorium, striding about and speaking without notes. Straight away he began tackling his image as a bumptious, over-ambitious chauvinist pig. He mocked himself, talking fondly about his wife and telling a story about his five-year-old daughter complaining about being told to shush while her father did yet another radio interview. Oh it’s always politics, politics, politics, Mr Cruz quoted her as grumbling, stamping his cowboy-booted feet. For some reason, the impersonation worked.

He moved quickly to mockery of his erudition, informing the audience that in the original Greek “politics” comes from “poli” for many, and ticks meaning “blood-sucking parasites”. The crowd laughed with relief, on realising they were getting a corny joke not a classics lecture.

Mr Cruz had some work to do. He had been preceded by a really ferocious speech from his snowy-haired father, Rafael Cruz, minutes earlier. The elder Cruz, who came to America from Cuba as a teenage student, is strong meat, even for a crowd of Iowan social conservatives. A pastor by background, the elder Cruz told only-half-helpful stories about how, as a teenager, his son gave 80 lectures on the American constitution and free-market principles at such events as Rotary Club lunches, and devoured the works of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek while still at junior high school.

After painting a picture of his son as a freakish prodigy, the elder Cruz proceeded to make America sound broken. All day the stage had seen a succession of grey-haired white men bewailing an America in which Christians are under siege from such foes as leftists, atheists and gays. The senator’s father decided to add his own lament. Same-sex marriage was a plot, the elder Cruz informed the crowd. It was not really about elevating gays, but instead was a socialist plot to destroy the concept of God. “They have to destroy all loyalties except loyalty to government. That’s what’s behind homosexual marriage,” Rafael Cruz thundered.

True, the crowd at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames was in the market for fervour. Many there were evangelical pastors and their families. Downstairs there were stalls selling patriotic videos by Newt Gingrich and special Bibles highlighting passages that had influenced America’s founding fathers. There were “Honk if you Homeschool” bumper stickers in the car park outside. Attacks on welfare handouts earned much applause, a message reinforced by a giant video screen showing quotations from the scriptures, among them: “The hand of the diligent shall rule, while the slothful will be put to forced labour.”

But even at such an event, tensions and divisions about political strategy and messaging could be clearly heard. Speakers could not seem to decide whether they were fired up because conservatives are a besieged minority in a country already heading for Hell, or livid because deep down America is a mostly conservative nation, which has merely been tricked by President Barack Obama and the forces of godless leftism.

Then there were disputes about the Republican Party’s economic messaging. An earlier speaker, the former senator and failed candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Rick Santorum, attacked the 2012 Romney campaign for focusing on job creators, entrepreneurs and business owners, while ignoring blue-collar Americans who might not want to start their own business, or work 80 hours a week. A rising tide does not lift all boats, Mr Santorum jabbed, a lot of people have holes in their boats and sometimes they sink.

Building on that message of don’t-forget-the-little-guy populism, Mr Santorum grumbled about “big-city” Republican strategists calling for the party to stress jobs and the economy and play down social issues. When it was his turn on stage Senator Cruz endeavoured to straddle all those different divides. He did so in a way that points to his strategy between now and the presidential primaries. His strategy may yet come a cropper, but it is sure to make him at least a powerfully disruptive force.

The Ted Cruz pitch is hard to summarise, as it is assembled from a set of seeming contradictions. Faced with arguments about whether to stress economics or social issues, he focused on an economic message, but only after swiftly establishing his social-conservative credentials with a series of coded hints and nods to his unyieldingly pure positions against abortion or in favour of gun rights.

Nodding to Mr Santorum’s economic populism without endorsing it, he offered what was, in essence, a classic supply-side Republican prescription for economic growth, involving less regulation and wholesale tax reform, but dressed it up in crowd-pleasing clothes.

In the eternal Republican dispute between sunny Reaganite optimism and dark, pessimistic rage he offered a hybrid: sunny, optimistic rage, suffused with a clever blend of self-promoting pandering to the grassroots. Yes, America is being betrayed by a cowardly elite that includes many Republicans as well as Democrats in Washington, Mr Cruz essentially told the crowd. But America can still be pulled back from the brink and returned to its status as a shining city on the hill, thanks to the extraordinary power of grassroots citizen demands for change… as long as those grassroots demands for change are being channelled by someone with the guts of Ted Cruz, a new boy in town.

Any echoes of hope, change and Barack Obama, circa 2008, are no accident. In a recent interview with Time magazine Mr Cruz told of urging aides to study how the young Illinois senator beat Hillary Clinton to the presidential nomination with a “guerrilla campaign that empowered the people”.

In the 2013 Ted Cruz version, that involves telling conservative activists that their fervour and intensity have already proved themselves more than enough to thwart Mr Obama and his allies in the Washington establishment. Look at the president’s plans for gun control after the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, Mr Cruz told the crowd. The American people engaged with the debate and preserved gun owners’ rights, he declared, to whoops and cheers.

Mr Cruz offered examples of how such an insurgency could be achieved again. Take the problem of tax reform, he ventured, before offering a solution that was the purest populist flim-flam. Instead of admitting why tax reform is hard (because most voters want other people’s deductions abolished but their own preserved), Mr Cruz laid into the Internal Revenue Service for investigating conservative groups seeking non-profit status, and declared that the best and simplest way to reform the tax code would be to abolish the IRS. Though he offered no details as to who might collect taxes in the future, the crowd bellowed its approval.

On regulatory reform, the simplest route would be to repeal “every single word” of the Obamacare health law, Mr Cruz argued, repeating his call for Republicans in Congress to use their powers over federal borrowing limits to shut the government down, unless Obamacare is starved of all funding.

Such populist grandstanding makes Republican rivals seethe. They point out that, with Democrats in control of the Senate and the White House, the IRS is not about to be abolished. They are sure that any attempt at a government shutdown would bounce back on Republicans. In interviews with political reporters, Mr Cruz scoffs at such concerns, calling his colleagues “scared”.

Standing on a stage in Iowa, Mr Cruz did not need to care whether his solutions would work. He received cheering, whistling standing ovations for them, anyway. If his quixotic windmill-charging fails, he knows that he can blame his fellow Republicans, accusing them of bowing to the forces of business-as-usual in Washington. And in the run-up to a party primary, his fellow Republicans are his enemy.

It is a sneaky strategy, but it rallied a crowd in deep-red Iowa on a Saturday afternoon in late summer. That in itself was no small achievement. Those in the windowless auditorium could have been down the road in Des Moines, enjoying deep-fried butter-on-a-stick, pork-chops-on-a-stick and other delights at the Iowa State Fair, a legendary institution that is currently in full swing.

At a minimum, Mr Cruz has more charm than some might imagine, and the beginnings of a cunning strategy for navigating the Republican primary. That strategy offers no clues as to how the Texan senator might win the 61m or so votes needed to take the White House: as mentioned before, his positions are far from the mainstream. But he can work a room. He can be funny. He is immensely self-confident. At this stage in the game, that is more than enough to justify a close eye on Mr Cruz.

(Photo credit: AFP)