RICHMOND, VA. — Under a feeble sun trying to clear a morning rain, Heidi Cruz hopped out of her rental car — coincidentally a Chevrolet Cruze — and headed for the Virginia elections office.

Her immediate task last Tuesday was to hand-deliver a carton of 10,907 signatures — more than double the number needed to put her husband’s name on the GOP presidential primary ballot in Virginia, one of a dozen mostly Southern “Super Tuesday” states, including Texas, that will go to the polls March 1.

But as the primary season draws near, Cruz’s underlying mission was more subtle: To round out the sharp edges of her husband’s image as a hard-nosed, no-compromise, scowling tea party conservative that many mainstream Republicans — notably former boss George W. Bush — find downright unlikable.

Not for the first time, and not without some sacrifice, she has put her career — she currently is on leave from her job as an executive with Goldman Sachs in Houston — on hold for the sake of her husband’s.

The mother of daughters Caroline, 7, and Catherine, 5, she now finds herself on the road almost as much as her husband, Ted.

She puts in grueling hours of daily donor phone calls, while conducting the gauzy retail politics of moments like the one outside the Virginia election office, where she shared hugs, greeted children and signed hand-made placards for a welcoming party of Old Dominion supporters.

Despite her own hard-charging career as an investment banker, Ted Cruz’s petite, 43-year-old wife has become one of the most visible spouses in the race.

Rounding out the picture of a happy family often is the job of a supportive political spouse extending the reach of the candidate. But the Cruz charm offensive is more nuanced, given her husband’s role as a party rebel. There’s also his singular appeal to social conservatives, particularly in the South, where she has been deployed lately.

Heidi Cruz — a Bush administration veteran, Harvard MBA, with a graduate degree from the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium — is more modern career woman than traditional housewife.

A journey

On Tuesday, following a swing through the Carolinas, Cruz was covering Richmond for her husband while he took care of Senate business 100 miles north in Washington. The girls were in school in Houston, where they usually are during the week, often joining their parents for campaign trail weekends.

With her blond hair brushed straight back, Cruz was all business in a prim white cardigan over form-fitting black slacks and 2-inch heels. She took to her task in the same tirelessly methodical way as her husband — but she was all smiles.

“I’ve always worked, being out on the road all week, talking to clients,” Cruz said in an interview. “Though this is a different client base, I’m used to being up in the morning, out of the house and on the road.”

Through the lens of the faith-based voters at the crux of the Cruz campaign, it’s all part of a Christian journey — which is exactly how she sees her role.

“Heidi is a perfect example a woman can do what she has been gifted to do by the Lord,” said Callie Chaplain, a Virginia campaign volunteer who brought her four home-schooled children — one of them carrying a toy hand grenade — to see the candidate’s wife. “She is smart, intelligent, decisive. She can be a mom, she can work hard, and she can balance the two how she wants.”

Someone once asked Cruz if she considers herself a traditional wife and mother.

“My answer was ‘absolutely,’ because I am the emotional center of our house. … For our kids, for my husband. I think that is what people mean when they say are you a traditional mother. Traditional mothers take many forms,” she said.

The Christian sense of calling has been central to Cruz since her childhood in Africa with her missionary parents, Seventh-Day Adventists who bequeathed to her the vegetarian diet of their faith.

“She feels called to do what she’s doing in support of her husband,” said Georgia GOP activist Kay Godwin, who has done several campaign events with Heidi Cruz. “She is honestly such a refreshing person. She puts such a personal face on Ted, the lawyer, the senator.”

In the South, a central part of the campaign’s strategic map, that personal touch counts for a lot.

The pitch

As the sun set over the Virginia Capitol, Cruz was scheduled to meet some of the campaign’s leading supporters a few blocks away in the Greek Revival style townhouse where Robert E. Lee retired after the surrender at Appomattox.

In the intimate setting of the Confederate general’s parlor, Cruz talked up the ideological underpinnings of the campaign and the strength of a conservative grass-roots army that could make victory possible. She finished with the standard campaign pitch for money.

But she also offered a personal portrait of her husband that she said is absent in the media: How they dated only six months before they decided to marry; how he struggled to ask her father for her hand in marriage; how he always has been surrounded by strong women, from his Cuban Aunt Sonia, to his mathematician mother, to his career-driven wife.

The picture she seeks to convey is more that of a serene statesman than an ideological bomb-thrower.

“Ted is relatively stress free,” she said, “He is unflappable. He has an even temper.”

The picture also goes contrary to his critics’ view of him as a self-centered politician of overweening ambition and ego.

“Ted does not take himself too seriously,” she said. “Much to his wife’s dismay, he is amazing on pop culture. He is a big video game player. He is a movie buff. He can tell you any line from any movie back to the 1950s.”

He’s fond of Broadway musicals and likes to sing to her — sometimes even over the phone. “Les Miserables” is a favorite. The couple’s “date night” comes every Sunday evening, when the campaign goes dormant. Ted Cruz, renowned for his memory, never forgets.

The presentation in the Stewart-Lee House was met with collective “awwws” and laughter — precisely the desired effect for a meticulously planned campaign where Heidi Cruz is an increasingly important asset.

Her host was Cruz Virginia campaign co-chairman and state Sen. Bill Stanley, a lawyer who was involved in the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton, the husband of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

“She’s no diamond in the rough,” Stanley said of Heidi Cruz afterward. “She’s a four-carat diamond.”

Transitions

Heidi Cruz’s journey hasn’t always been sweetness and light. When they met on the Bush campaign in 2000, she already had her eyes on a career in business. It was a passion she had carried with her since her childhood days in southern California selling home-made bread with her brother.

She had worked on Wall Street and also knew her way around Washington, having interned in college for her hometown congressman, California Republican Jerry Lewis.

Ted Cruz, a Harvard Law grad, had clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, and already was working as a lawyer on the Bush campaign. They were married soon after the election.

“It was for both of us, strangely, kind of love at first sight,” Heidi Cruz recalled. “I found Ted very charming. He was interesting and interested. He clearly had a unique combination of deep intellect, charm and wit, and quite a lot of room in his life for fun.”

They also shared the common bond of growing up in strong Christian homes.

“We had the shared values of our upbringing,” she said, “and the belief that we are all on this earth for a short time to serve others and to live for something beyond ourselves.”

Heidi Cruz parlayed her campaign experience into a prestigious job as an assistant to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, right-hand man to Bush family consigliere James Baker.

But Ted Cruz, by his own account, made few friends on the campaign. When the spoils were divided, he found himself disappointed to be given a job in the relative backwater of the Federal Trade Commission.

So when then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott offered Ted Cruz the post of state solicitor general, he decided to take it, putting the newlyweds in a long-distance, Washington-to-Austin relationship.

By then, Heidi Cruz had moved over to a White House post on the staff of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. She loved the job. But she eventually would move to Texas for the sake of their marriage.

“She would have stayed had it not been for Ted,” said Edward Haley, one of her professors at Claremont McKenna College in California, where she started a college Republicans chapter as an undergraduate.

Haley, one of her lifelong mentors, described Heidi Cruz as ambitious, but singularly clear-eyed, grounded, and practical. He saw her as a good fit for the Bush and Baker brand of mainstream Republicanism.

He certainly didn’t find her to be as “provocative” as her husband.

“She would never take the debaters’ positions that are honed to such sharp hyperbole,” Haley said. “That’s not Heidi’s style. Conservative? Sure. She has always been.”

But he also sees her as a valuable partner in the couple’s life mission. “She’s got the chops,” Haley said. “And she wants to help Ted.”

Depression

The transition to Texas wasn’t easy. Heidi Cruz, by her husband’s own account, struggled with a brief bout of depression. In his campaign autobiography, “A Time for Truth,” he said that she overcame it with prayer, family support and Christian counseling.

It surfaced publicly one evening in August 2005, when an Austin police officer found her sitting in the grass near a freeway ramp in Austin, having walked away from her home nearby. A passer-by had reported seeing her there, a redacted police report states, “with her head in her hands.”

The officer, finding that she wasn’t drunk or on medication, decided she nevertheless was a “danger to herself” and gave her a lift from the highway.

She accounts for it as a moment of spiritual reckoning.

“I wouldn’t describe it as stress so much as it was just a transitional period for me where I had to figure out how God would use me in this next chapter,” she said.

Ten years later, her husband’s career in politics has her once again putting her own career on hold — the leave from Goldman Sachs — “to do something that has an uncertain outcome,” she said.

It’s not unlike their decision to sink their entire liquid assets — some $1.2 million in savings — to buy television time for the final push in his 2012 U.S. Senate campaign.

Now she sees it as part of God’s plan for her, a continuation of her life journey. She would not be so presumptuous as to ask God for victory, only to show her the way forward.

“Because this is another chapter change where I don’t know the outcome,” she said. “But He will lead my life experience to a higher place.”

kevin.diaz@chron.com

twitter.com/DiazChron