Ted Cruz wasn’t even supposed to be a member of the U.S. Senate when he began his campaign back in 2011. But there he is, the junior Republican senator from Texas.
A University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll has some rather strange news – depending, of course, on your point of view – regarding just how far Cruz has climbed up the political mountain. Cruz is the prohibitive favorite among Texas Republicans to become their party’s 2016 presidential nominee.
http://www.texastribune.org/2013/06/17/uttt-poll-texans-favor-cruz-over-perry-president/
Yikes!
Cruz polls much better than another guy we’ve all heard of: Gov. Rick “Oops” Perry, the guy who tried and failed famously in his brief run for the GOP nomination in 2012.
Sen. Cruz ran in the Republican primary last year against Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the man with the deepest pockets in Texas politics and the odds-on favorite to succeed fellow Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who didn’t seek another term. Then Dewhurst ran into Cruz, who beat him in the Republican runoff and went on to win the general election handily against former Democratic state Rep. Paul Sadler of Henderson.
Since taking office those months ago, Cruz has taken on a role once performed by another loudmouthed Texan, former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm, of whom it was once said, “The most dangerous place in the world is the space between Phil Gramm and a television camera.” Cruz loves the limelight perhaps even more than Gramm did. He basks in it, saying strange things about Democrats and even some of his fellow Republicans. He lectures senior senators on the Constitution and in his goofy way demonstrates that he isn’t going to be stalled by such things as Senate decorum and protocol.
The Texas Tribune reported this about the poll: “’What you’re seeing here with the Cruz number is that he has become the pre-eminent rising conservative in Texas,’ said poll co-director Jim Henson, who runs the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. ‘What we’re witnessing in the numbers is Cruz running ahead and reaching back for the baton, and Rick Perry has the baton. The only question is whether Rick Perry is ready to hand it to him.’”
Cruz’s rise almost – please note I said “almost” – makes me hope that Gov. Perry refuses to hand it over.