With this in mind, Cantor dispatched a top staffer, Neil Bradley, to the weekly staff meeting for the Republican Study Committee caucus on Monday afternoon to strategize with the hundred-plus conservative congressional aides in attendance. Bradley’s mission was to help figure out a way to sate the right wing’s appetite for red meat without shish-kebabing the entire party. To do this, Bradley tried to paint a scary picture of the cataclysmic repercussions that could result if a shutdown occurred.
Perhaps the most dire outcome, Bradley told the group, is that our soldiers won’t receive their paychecks.
This assertion prompted one of Cruz’s lieutenants in the room—an aide named Max Pappas—to stand in objection.
That’s not true, Pappas argued. You know as well as I do that if the government shuts down, Congress can simply pass a stopgap bill that pays the troops until it’s over. All this destitute-soldier tripe is nothing more than petty scare tactics and typical excuse making from the yellow-bellied establishment.
Pappas might have continued reciting his Cruz-crafted talking points—but all of a sudden, another Republican aide in the room sprang to her feet and cut him off. She introduced herself as a staffer in Texas representative John Culberson’s office, and then—without warning—launched into an unbridled tirade against Cruz and his allies. She pilloried the Texas senator for bringing his Shutdown-palooza road show into her boss’s district—whipping up local conservatives into a delusional, cultlike hysteria and demonizing any Republican officeholder who was disinclined to guzzle his cyanide-spiked Kool-Aid.
Why, she demanded to know, was Cruz doing this? Why was he insisting on making everyone else’s life so difficult?
It was a remarkable moment for such a typically staid staff meeting, and soon rumors of the confrontation would hit the Internet, forcing Representative Culberson to release a statement distancing himself from the comments.
But in that instance—as the exasperated Republican staffer let loose a torrent of scorn on Cruz and his narcissistic, nihilistic brand of politics—she wasn’t just speaking for her backbencher boss. She was giving voice to the Capitol Hill in crowd’s fast-hardening disdain for the self-obsessed freshman who refused to fit in.
“You are not dealing in reality!” she huffed to Cruz’s aide, drawing supportive applause from dozens of Republican aides in the room.
And yet reality was an increasingly fluid thing in Washington. The customary decorum and established procedures that once made up the very atomic matter of the Senate had been rapidly dissipating ever since the Tea Party came to town, and the result was a dark and growing void where the laws of the universe no longer applied. As far as Cruz was concerned, these frightened politicos could scurry around trying to reverse the galactic tide all they wanted, but it was never going to work.
He was here now. He’d arrived. This was the big bang.
On September 20, 2013, Cruz notched his first big win since arriving in Washington when the House of Representatives heeded his clarion call and voted 230 to 189 to keep the government open through December 15 on the sole condition that Obamacare’s budget was looted of every last dime.
The victory would be short-lived. The House bill was now headed to the Democrat-controlled Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid had already declared it would be dead on arrival. Even if the bill did somehow make it to the president’s desk, Obama had already pledged to break out his veto stamp.
Meanwhile, hordes of GOP opinion makers were stampeding toward the nearest cameras and keyboards to pile on Cruz and what they called the “Kamikaze Caucus.” In the Washington Post, conservative commentator Jennifer Rubin eviscerated Cruz and Lee, charging that they were “intent on running into a concrete wall again and again to prove their political machismo.”
And on Fox News Sunday, Karl Rove took the Tea Partiers to task for flouting even the most basic expectations of partisan courtesy. “You cannot build a congressional majority, in either party, for any kind of action, unless you are treating your colleagues with some certain amount of respect and saying, ‘Hey, what do you think of my idea?’” Rove said. “Instead, they have dictated to their colleagues.”
While the entire political world coalesced around the conventional wisdom that the defund gambit was a bust, the Texas senator was busy beating the war drum as furiously as ever.
Hold the line!
Don’t retreat!
Victory is at hand!
“Republicans have the momentum,” Cruz declared three days after the House vote. “All we have to do is have the will to fight.”
The senator had the uncanny message discipline of a North Korean propagandist—and his performance was increasingly perplexing to the politicos of the Washington establishment. Cruz was still new to Washington, and many of them had assumed this whole time that he was playing some sort of Machiavellian game with a built-in exit strategy. But now the federal government was days away from running out of money, and there was no sign of an endgame in sight. As this new reality dawned on Washington, some in the political world began to wonder if they had been wrong about Cruz. Could it be possible that he really was the wild-eyed true believer he played at Tea Party rallies? Did he actually believe—against all evidence to the contrary—that this cockamamie scheme could work?
And if so, how far was he willing to take it?
Chapter Ten
All In
On September 24, 2013, Ted Cruz stood behind a mahogany lectern on the Senate floor, sporting a dark gray suit, a powder-blue necktie, and a pair of his most orthopedically advanced tennis shoes, as he delivered an important lesson about gambling to his fellow Republicans. “In a game of poker,” he said, “if somebody makes a bet and then says to you, ‘If you raise me, I am going to fold,’ you will lose one hundred percent of your poker games. That is a path to losing.”
Cruz had come to the floor just after 2 p.m. declaring his intention “to speak in support of defunding Obamacare until I am no longer able to stand”—and now he was making his case for calling the Democrats’ bluff.
The seed for Cruz’s filibuster idea had been planted back in March, when Rand Paul gripped the nation’s attention for nearly thirteen hours by rambling about habeas corpus and military drones and the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Cruz remembered being impressed by Rand’s ingenuity—but he thought he could do better.
The defund-Obamacare movement had caught fire because of him, and conservative revolutionaries across the country now fervently believed they were on the brink of beating back the Obama regime’s health-care power grab and finally turning the tide in the fight for America’s soul—if only Washington’s more weak-willed Republicans would hold the line. Cruz was intent on keeping his followers riled up, and he had come into the filibuster today armed with an arsenal of made-for-YouTube provocations—viral-ready stunts, one-liners, stories, and jokes—that his office planned to launch into the ether and send ricocheting around the right-wing Web until every true believer with an Internet connection was rallying to their cause beneath the #MakeDCListen banner—and hassling their congresspeople to heed Cruz’s call.
Now that he had begun to speak, he made no secret of these intentions. “The only way this fight is going to be won,” he said, “is if the American people speak so loudly that the politicians in this body have no choice but to listen to the people.”
With six days to go before the federal government was forced to shut down, Washington’s only hope for averting disaster was a bipartisan compromise hastily hammered out in Congress—and the Senate chamber had been seized by Cruz and his invading army of grassroots guerrillas.
Over the next twenty-one hours, Cruz would cycle through dozens of colorful metaphors and weighty analogies to describe the nature of their fight. At one point, he compared Washington to the World Wrestling Federation, where the matches are “all rigged.” At another, he chided the naysayers in his party by taking them through an epic historical journey of doubts defeated and
evil vanquished—from the “ragtag bunch of colonists in the eighteenth century” who stood up to Great Britain, to the Nazi appeasers who thought the Germans were indestructible, to the people who said a man would never walk on the moon.
At a little after 8 p.m., Cruz took a break from his lofty oratory to announce that it was his daughters’ bedtime and he was now going to read them a story via C-SPAN2. He produced a copy of Green Eggs and Ham and spent the next several minutes reading through each page, his voice occasionally lapsing into the same grave, dramatic tone he used in the rest of his speech—like a Sam-I-am burdened by the weight of the world. After wishing his girls a good night, he then turned the Dr. Seuss story into a parable for the hopelessly unpalatable health-care law.
“Three and a half years ago, President Obama and Senate Democrats told the American people, just try Obamacare,” he said. “When Americans tried it, they discovered… they did not like Obamacare in a box, with a fox, in a house, or with a mouse.”
The stunt immediately went viral, as Cruz knew it would, and the YouTube video soon became a near-perfect political Rorschach test. To the senator’s admirers, it scanned as sweet, funny, and maybe even iconic. To his detractors, it was infuriating and repellant. As for Cruz, he didn’t particularly care who or how many ended up in each column. All that mattered to him was that they were paying attention.
When Cruz was a freshman at Princeton in 1988, he liked to start the day with a pump-up ritual. Each morning, before leaving his dorm room, he would flip open his cassette player and pop in a Queen tape. As his favorite song—his ballad, his anthem—reached the chorus, the freshman would crank up the volume and sing along in full voice: We are the champions! We are the champions! No time for losers, ’cause we are the champions of the world!
Michael Lubetsky, one of Cruz’s few friends at Princeton, was often within earshot during these performances, and the more he got to know the peculiar freshman, the more it made sense. Cruz certainly had no time or tolerance for losers. A star student at one of the most prestigious universities on the planet, he spent his weekends racking up titles at national debate tournaments and his evenings pacing the marble halls in a quiet campus building as he worked on perfecting his rhetorical craft.
Cruz became best friends with his debate partner, David Panton, a sixteen-year-old Jamaica-born prodigy, and the two spent late nights playing Sonic the Hedgehog and gossiping about the internal politics of the debate team. They were lucky to have each other, because almost no one else on campus liked them. Once, when they weren’t around, their team held a whimsical mock debate to argue the pros and cons of turning Cruz and Panton into traffic cones. One argument in favor: it would benefit their need for exposure.
But while Cruz tended to rub people the wrong way, those who knew him best said he was desperate to be liked. One Princeton classmate, Craig Mazin, would later recount to the Daily Beast—with an obvious agenda of humiliation—that Cruz used to saunter down to the girls’ side of the residential hall decked out in a paisley bathrobe and apparently looking to get lucky. “I would end up fielding the [girls’] complaints,” Mazin recalled. “‘Could you please keep your roommate out of our hallway?’” But while young Ted’s nighttime strolls served to type-cast him with many of his Princeton dorm mates as a creep who couldn’t take a hint, the truth was that he was probably just looking for someone to talk to.
Cruz’s struggle to make friends wasn’t just a product of his know-it-all arrogance—after all, that was not an exotic breed at Princeton. It was that as a conservative, middle-class boy from Texas, he didn’t fit in with the typical Ivy League types. And try as he might, he could never convincingly fake it as so many others did. “Part of playing the game involves to some extent schmoozing up with people, sometimes pretending to be something you’re not,” Lubetsky later reflected. “I think Ted’s ability to do that is extremely limited… He comes across as very condescending, very patronizing, because he is what he is. He tries.”
Cruz eventually developed a close relationship with his professor and thesis adviser, Robbie George. A nationally renowned scholar who was widely credited as the intellectual leader of Christian conservatism, George spotted Ted’s uncommon potential right away. But the professor also recognized how easily the student’s particular brand of superiority could put off his peers. “Princeton is a university full of superstars. All the kids were valedictorian, had 1,600 SATs. Concert pianists, high school quarterbacks—they all come in and they’re amazing,” George explained. “Even in that group, Ted came in and he stood out. Add to that the fact that Ted’s views are so politically incorrect, and they’re offended by his views, and that’s gotta generate a certain amount of jealousy and resentment.”
The pattern repeated itself when Cruz got to Harvard Law School, where he quickly became known for his flamboyant snobbishness when it came to matters of intellect. One of his roommates would later claim that Cruz refused to study with anyone who didn’t have an Ivy League undergrad under his belt—and that “he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown” either.
But while much stayed the same for Cruz at Harvard Law, one thing did change: he learned how to gamble. As an undergrad, he had once accumulated $1,800 in debt over the course of numerous dorm room poker games, and he had been forced to borrow money from an aunt to pay it back. Many years later, when his Senate press secretary was asked about the incident, she claimed that the humiliating experience had taught Cruz a valuable lesson, and he “promptly quit the game.”
In fact, he carried his habit to Cambridge, where he developed quite a reputation at the card tables in Hastings Hall. His Harvard classmates would remember him pulling more than a few all-nighters playing protracted poker games, during which his signature move was to unexpectedly push all his chips forward and declare, through his omnipresent smirk, that he was “all in.” In poker, the normal reason for employing such a tactic is to enable a big payout when you think you have an unbeatable hand. But the game’s most risk-prone players—the ones with the greatest appetites for danger and drama—were those who gambled everything on a lousy hand just to scare their opponents into folding. It was a precarious strategy, and success required a player with almost unnerving confidence and an impenetrable poker face.
Cruz, it turned out, had both.
As one Harvard card buddy, Alexander Acosta, would later recall, “You’d never know if he’s bluffing.”
Cruz’s Obamacare filibuster was met with a procession of eye rolls, give-me-a-breaks, and general staff-wide snark on Rand Paul’s team. From the moment the filibuster began, Rand’s advisers pegged Cruz’s production as a comically bad sequel to their own boss’s filibuster, complete with a B-list leading man; a lame, market-tested hashtag; and an obviously contrived premise. For all of Cruz’s phony sermonizing about crusading against the establishment, Rand’s Senate aides happened to know that Cruz had actually asked permission from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid earlier in the week to put on this little talent show of his. The Democratic leader had agreed, but made sure he retained the power to gavel Cruz’s grandstanding to a conclusion whenever he felt like it—making it impossible to even call the exercise a “filibuster” at all.
Now, watching the drama unfold on live television, Rand’s aides sniggered among one another at the self-seriousness of it all. You get ’em, Ted! We need more fearless conservatives like you around!
But as much fun as they had mocking Cruz, the members of Rand’s inner circle were also genuinely annoyed that this display of faux civil virtue would now inevitably be compared to their boss’s authentically principled stand.
“There is a major difference,” one of Paul’s frustrated senior advisers told me while Cruz babbled on into the night. “Rand’s [filibuster] was spontaneous and with a goal of achieving something real. The politics of it were unknown. Ted is simply pandering to the conservative grass roots for selfish reasons: to promote himself as an outsider.”
; As for Rand himself, he thought the entire defund campaign reeked of pandering and performance art.
On the other hand, he knew that if he didn’t show up on the Senate floor at least briefly to join Cruz’s “filibuster” it would raise a flagrant red flag to Tea Partiers and libertarian activists. And so, at around 5:30 p.m., Rand decided to get it over with. He schlepped from his office to the Senate floor, and when it was his turn to talk, he dutifully congratulated his colleague for “bringing attention” to the disastrous effects of Obamacare. Soon he arrived at his question—one to which he genuinely wanted an answer.
“I would ask the senator from Texas: what are his intentions?” Rand said. “Does he want to shut down the government, or would he like to find something to make Obamacare less bad? I know we would both like to repeal it, but would the senator accept anything in between?”
Rather than answer the question, Cruz responded with an over-the-top outpouring of flattery for and fawning over Rand. Cruz gushed about his “historic filibuster,” which had so inspired him that he counted his participation in it “one of the proudest moments of my life.” Rand, in full view of C-SPAN and his colleagues, politely made an effort to appear chummy. But when Cruz finally ended his garrulous response with yet another plug for his canned slogan—“Make DC listen!”—Rand couldn’t quite let him get away with the evasion.
“Would the senator yield for one quick question?” Rand asked, straining to keep up the polite tone of the proceedings. He pressed Cruz again on whether the current standoff could possibly be resolved, and suggested a hypothetical scenario: what if the president acknowledged that his law had serious problems, and requested the Republicans’ help in fixing it before any more Americans lost their jobs, or their preferred health coverage? Would Cruz then be willing to accept a compromise?
The Wilderness Page 18