Over
the course of his brief, polarizing career in electoral politics, Texas
Sen. Ted Cruz has been called many names, especially by liberals.
“Dirty Syrup Guzzler” (Jon Stewart). “Creature from the Nether Regions” (Cher). “The Most Dangerous Canadian in America” (the Huffington Post).
Yet
so far the most indelible description of Cruz has come from a fellow
conservative. In 2013, when Cruz decided to protest U.S. drone policy by
filibustering the nomination of incoming CIA chief John Brennan, John
McCain told reporter Jon Ward — now a senior political correspondent for
Yahoo News — that his junior colleague was a “wacko bird.”
The sobriquet stuck. It was emblazoned on T-shirts. It appeared in countless headlines. Cruz himself proudly displays a black WACKO BIRD baseball cap with a picture of Daffy Duck on it in his Senate office.
By
using that particular moniker, McCain was, in effect, dismissing Cruz
as both flighty and crazy. And for the most part that is exactly how the
Texan has been characterized in both the press and the public
imagination since he alighted on Washington, D.C., nearly three years
ago and immediately set about trolling his fellow Republicans and hijacking the legislative process:
as an irresponsible far-right demagogue prone to behave in irrational,
counterproductive ways. Cruz’s showy obstructionism suffers from “basic
logic problems” and “just doesn’t make sense,” wrote the
Atlantic’s Molly Ball in 2013. “Zealot leaders” like Cruz “forget that
the key to leadership is essentially getting results by moving agendas
ahead,” added Inc. magazine.
Many pundits were skeptical when, in a speech at Virginia’s evangelical Liberty University on March 23 , Cruz became the first Republican to announce he was entering the 2016 presidential race. As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn put it at the time, “The most interesting question about Mr. Cruz’s candidacy is whether he has a very small chance to win or no chance at all.”
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