Ted Cruz (ex-Canadian)

Click here for a nine-page article in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin entitled "The Absolutist." Elias Isquith of Salon's comment on the article: "The clear takeaway: All that red meat he throws to the GOP base? He means every word."

Cruz was outstanding on debate teams at Princeton and Harvard, and soon became one of the best appellate lawyers in Texas. The skills of an appellate lawyer are different from those of a trial lawyer, who must constantly be open to negotiations and plea bargains. At the appellate level, there is no room left for bargaining: All that is left is to state your case in the strongest, most effective way possible. That appellate-level approach carries over to his politics. He does not negotiate. He is inflexible. It must be his way, all or nothing.

Here (in bold) are the subheadings in Isquith's Salon article:

He thinks Republican presidential candidates lose because they’re insufficiently right-wing.

“It is amazing that the wisdom of the chattering class to the Republicans is always, always, always ‘Surrender your principles and agree with the Democrats,’” he told me. “That’s been true for my entire lifetime. The chattering classes have consistently said, ‘You crazy Republicans have to give up on what you believe and become more like Democrats.’ And, I would note, every time Republicans do that we lose.”

He thinks last year’s government shutdown went just swell.

“Many voices in Washington say the fight that we had last fall was not successful,” Cruz told me. “Like any good litigator, at times you think of a battle as a long-term battle. You don’t always accomplish everything in the first skirmish. As a consequence of millions of people last summer and fall getting engaged in that battle, I believe we dramatically elevated the national debate over the harms of Obamacare. And today Democrats are running scared, and the prevailing wisdom is Republicans are quite likely to win control of the Senate because of Obamacare.”

He was nurtured by the conservative movement from a young age.

When Cruz was in his early teens, in Houston, his parents enrolled him in an after-school program run by Rolland Storey, a retired energy executive who wanted to instill the values of the free market in young people. At the Free Enterprise Institute, Storey had his young charges read Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and other authors revered by conservatives, and then give speeches at Rotary Clubs and similar venues around the state.

“Ted was just an amazing speaker at fourteen, by far the most impressive student we ever had,” Winston Elliott III, who became affiliated with Storey’s organization when Cruz was a student and now serves as its president, told me.

When he was young, his father, Rafael — a pastor and Cuban émigré — would warn him that then-President Jimmy Carter was like Fidel Castro.

“It all started for us in 1980, when Ted was nine years old,” Rafael Cruz told me. “I was involved with a group called the Religious Roundtable, which was working with the Moral Majority to help mobilize Christians to elect Ronald Reagan. All during that year, we talked every night about how important it was to get rid of this socialist-leftist President Carter and replace him with a constitutional conservative, Ronald Reagan. I must have told Ted a dozen times, ‘When I was in Cuba and they took away our freedoms, I had a place to go. If we lose our freedoms here, where are we going to go?’”

He adores the Federalist Society, a group of conservatives dedicated toward promoting a strongly conservative reading of the Constitution, and considers it his “home."

Founded in 1982, the society is a forum for discussion of conservative legal ideas. It takes no formal positions on issues, and members don’t agree with each other on every topic, but it has long operated as the network for potential Republican judicial nominees and executive-branch officials. In practice, the Federalist approach has meant an “originalist” view of the Constitution, which, in turn, reflects the priorities of the modern Republican Party—including an expansive view of an individual’s right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, a rejection of constitutional protections for a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, a porous barrier between church and state, and a narrow conception of the power of the federal government to intervene in the economy.

Apparently he's not a charlatan pandering to the rubes: He's the real deal. Scary thought.