Man in the News
A Tea Party Intellect From Texas, Poised to Join the Senate
Man in the News
A Tea Party Intellect From Texas, Poised to Join the Senate
By ERIK ECKHOLM
By ERIK ECKHOLM
Published: August 1, 2012
HOUSTON — As a teenager, Ted Cruz was an intense and eloquent parser of free-market economics, dazzling Rotary Clubs here in Houston by reciting the Constitution. At Princeton, he was a national champion debater and an intellectual leader of a band of conservative students. He was a star at Harvard Law School and clerked for the chief justice of the United States.
Michael Stravato for The Texas Tribune
Ted Cruz celebrated after winning a runoff election for the Republican Senate nomination on Tuesday in Houston.
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But few may have imagined Mr. Cruz, 41, in his newest role, as the Tea Party favorite and Republican candidate for the United States Senate, trading verbal orchids with the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. Mr. Cruz earned the nomination on Tuesday in a runoff election after more than a year of sweaty street campaigning, drawing national attention for beating Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the more experienced nominee of the Texas Republican establishment.
Any time the establishment gets hammered anywhere, it should be a lesson to the establishment everywhere.“I’d have predicted that he would be a professor, not a politician,” said Robert P. George, Mr. Cruz’s adviser at Princeton in the early 1990s. Professor George, a noted social conservative, said that Mr. Cruz stood out even among his Ivy League peers as “intellectually and morally serious,” writing his thesis on the separation of powers.
Instead, we get people like McKenna, Dunn and Finkbeiner... the Milquetoast Republicans.
I'd cheerfully trade the lot of them for one Cruz.
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