He paused, lost for a moment in thought. “You know,” he said, ing his head, “I’m convinced that the real divide in American politics isn’t between Republican and Democrat—it’s between the people and the entrenched politicians in Washington, D.C.”
It sounded like an applause line to me. And so, coming from nowhere, did a call to abolish the IRS. He went on in this mode for a while, until, leaning back on a couch in his office with his press secretary a few feet away tapping her BlackBerry, he began to sound as if he was giving a stump speech, and then I realized: He was giving a stump speech. Line after line I had heard him say on C-SPAN or YouTube. He told me the life story of his father, a Cuban immigrant, in precisely the same words he had used in the convention speech. He launched into a tribute to Ronald Reagan that I had first heard last year in his campaign for the Senate. The Margaret Thatcher quote sounded familiar, too.
And it sounded even more familiar a few hours later when Cruz spoke before a meeting of the Kingwood Tea Party, north of Houston. His press secretary and I didn’t applaud in his office when he told us about the real divide in American politics, but they went wild in Kingwood. They nodded knowingly when he talked about what focused the minds of politicians. I paged through my interview notes to find something he might have told me that he wasn’t saying to the Tea Partiers right then, in nearly identical language. I failed.
I’m not complaining. Professional public speakers have no choice but to recycle material. And for the hack, hearing a politician say the same thing multiple times makes note-taking vastly easier. “Disciplined” is a term of art in politics, and generally a compliment. It describes a stubborn, admirable, and often necessary insistence on the part of a politician on talking about only what he wants to talk about, in terms of his choosing. I think Cruz senses that his fluency seems slightly artificial, a little too pat, since he takes care to alter his cadence and punctuate it with “you knows” and “let me tell yas” and those thoughtful pauses that allow him to glance reflectively off to the side and bite his lower lip, before rousing himself to deliver a sentence he has delivered several hundred times.
It doesn’t stop, though. Later we sat together in the back seat of a car driving to another speech. Cruz spoke in personal ways about going to his alma mater, Princeton, but the word clumps from the speeches, the set pieces that he arranges in one sequence or another and seldom departs from, were always within reach. He spoke of his father again. He mentioned the great divide in America, again, and was quoting Margaret Thatcher when I realized he was giving a speech again, except this time at close quarters, only a few feet away, in the back seat of a car. I made a quick calculation of how many vertebrae I would damage if I slipped the lock, opened the door, and did a tuck and roll onto the passing pavement. The answer was: too many. So I contented myself with looking out the window at the Houston exurbs until the speech wound down and I could ask another question, after which the speech resumed and I watched the endless series of tire stores and taco stands and Jiffy Lubes roll by.
In normal life a human being who was as disciplined as Cruz would seem merely creepy. But of course Cruz doesn’t lead a normal life, and nobody, not his detractors or his fans, would have it any other way.
"He was always a good talker,” his mother Eleanor Darragh told me not long ago
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he certainly did a good job on hitting all the soundbites: Reagan, flat-tax, abolish IRS, cons utionalist, our ally Israel, communism...
