Getty Opinion Ted Cruz, Sitting Pretty If the general environment fits Cruz nicely, the dynamic of the campaign is favorable to him, too.

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

Ted Cruz isn’t topping the polls or dominating the conversation, but he’s one of the winners of the past few months.

His odds of winning the nomination have increased more than anyone else’s besides Donald Trump, and if you believe (reasonably enough) that Trump isn’t built to last, more than anyone else’s, period.


Let’s review. There was always the danger of Cruz, who made his national reputation on the strength of a misbegotten government shutdown, seeming like too much of a bomb-thrower. That was before it began to look like the Republican Party is open to a candidate only slightly less disruptive than Auguste Vaillant, the 19th-century French anarchist who struck a blow against politics as usual by literally throwing a bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies in 1893 (the establishment wasn’t amused — it executed him).

Such is the disgust with the Republican leadership, that there is no longer such a thing as going too far. Cruz could burn John Boehner in effigy, and no one would bat an eye. Cruz could make a citizen’s arrest of Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor on grounds of gross crimes of omission against the constitutional republic, and the Luntz focus group would applaud his plucky initiative. In sum, there’s nothing Cruz could do short of pissing in the Yankee Bean soup in the Senate dining room that would be too outlandish, and even then his most devoted fans might say, “It’s about damn time!”

This must be liberating for Cruz, who has already called McConnell a liar and blamed Boehner and McConnell for not stopping the Iran nuclear deal — and he’s just getting started.

If the general environment fits Cruz nicely, the dynamic of the campaign is favorable to him, too. There are few things Cruz should welcome more than the ongoing war between Trump, the anti-establishment gorilla in the room who is a major obstacle in his path, and the foremost establishment candidate, Jeb Bush, whom Cruz needs to be as weak as possible. Cruz can stand by and hope both sides lose, which isn’t a far-fetched bet.

While other campaigns have been flummoxed and discombobulated by the rise of Trump, Cruz hasn’t. He has a simple political True North — go where the base is. Once it became obvious Trump was catching on with the grass roots, Cruz’s play was obvious: Start acting as if Ronald Reagan’s only failure was not to have handed down a 12th Commandment — thou shalt not criticize Donald Trump.

Cruz can be very patient waiting for the mogul to come down to earth. The Texas senator has an ideological and geographical base that means he can play the long game.

Consider Iowa. Cruz is sitting in third place there, a comfortable place to be in the late-breaking state. He has captured the intense loyalty of a portion of the grass roots (evident in his consistently crowd-pleasing speeches) and lines up for the caucuses better than Trump does. Cruz is a preacher’s son who announced his campaign at Liberty University. He speaks forcefully on the social issues and is a down-the-line conservative, without a hint of a heterodoxy.

If he were to emerge and win Iowa, he would have a much stronger financial and institutional base to follow up his victory than the immediate past winners, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee. Cruz has raised more hard money than anyone else, and has significant super PAC support. If he merely held his own until March 1, he’d be in position to sop up delegates in the SEC states, including Texas.

On top of this, Cruz is very smart, disciplined and doesn’t make unforced errors — if he gets an opening, he’ll make the most of it.

Getting that opening will depend on Trump and Ben Carson fading (and someone else, like Carly Fiorina, not rising). But all Cruz needs is for the voters to become slightly, and only slightly, more desirous of political experience.

The Overton window has shifted enough that Cruz, in the Senate less than three years, almost all of it spent in political pyrotechnics, looks like the sober statesman. Compared to Donald Trump, he’s practically Everett Dirksen. Compared to Carson, he’s a career politician — a veteran of the George W. Bush campaign and administration who ran for the U.S. Senate as soon as plausible, and apparently has no intention of leaving unless it’s for a promotion.

It once seemed that Scott Walker could best Cruz with his record of accomplishment, but so far Republican voters aren’t in an accomplishment mood. It’s possible to imagine Cruz’s team secretly thinking, “What good fortune that our candidate has never governed anything, or seriously tried to pass major legislation.”

Of course, Cruz’s potential may never be realized. He should, in theory, be the elected officeholder next in line to pick up support from the outsiders, but he is very different stylistically from them. While Trump always lets it fly extemporaneously, Cruz is extremely deliberate. While Trump and Carson ooze sincerity, Cruz can let his calculation show — he sincerely supported trade promotion authority, until the politics shifted, and then he sincerely opposed it. While Trump and Carson are refreshingly different as communicators, Cruz is practiced and stentorian. He could make ordering a ham-and-cheese sandwich sound like a speech. (Trump is also, in many respects, a raging moderate, whose support ranges much more widely across the party than Cruz’s.)

However shrewdly Cruz is positioned in the primary, his candidacy might be a heavy lift in a general election. But there’s time to worry about that later. Cruz certainly has a more intuitive theory of the case than Jeb Bush: to wit, you have to win the primary to have a chance to win the general.

Unlike Trump and Carson, Cruz doesn’t need the usual political rules to be utterly suspended to win the nomination. He just needs them to be different, and to get some lucky bounces along the way. That looks likelier than it did six months ago.

