Cruz hides in plebeian armor

By Frank Bruni

Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2015 | 2 a.m.

Venerated political strategist David Axelrod once described a presidential campaign as “an MRI for the soul.” It winds up being precisely that.

But in its earliest stages, a presidential campaign is more like a costume ball.

And right now, perhaps no candidate wears a mask as thick as Ted Cruz’s.

He had it on during the recent GOP debate, when he lashed out at any Republican who gave any ground on illegal immigration.

“The politics of it would be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande,” he thundered, and there was no mistaking the contempt he meant to communicate for those elite, out-of-touch professionals.

But where does that contempt leave him?

He’s a lawyer, with a degree from Harvard, which was his stepping stone to a conventionally ambitious Supreme Court clerkship.

Where does that contempt leave his wife, Heidi?

She’s a banker, on leave from a job with Goldman Sachs in Houston, where she ran the wealth-management unit, which focuses on clients with an average net worth of $40 million.

To hear Cruz talk — or, rather, grandstand — he’s the ultimate outsider, the consummate underdog, in perpetual conflict with the ruling class and in perfect harmony with common folk.

There’s rarely mention of Harvard. Or of Princeton, where he got his college diploma.

There’s rarely mention of his stint in the policy shop of George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, a dynastic enterprise that was as pure an expression of the Republican establishment’s wishes as could be.

There’s rarely mention of his role in recruiting John Roberts, who would later get a seat on the Supreme Court, to the legal team doing battle for Bush during the 2000 Florida recount. No, that would undercut his rants now about Roberts’ insufficiently pure conservatism as the high court’s chief justice.

It would emphasize how well-connected Cruz is. And it would contradict his pose for the presidential race, in which he’s the prairie populist, replete with Western iconography and attire.

The current chapter of the 2016 contest has brought fresh focus to the fibs candidates tell about themselves, the tweaks they make to their biographies, the misimpressions they promote.

Did Ben Carson really try to stab someone during a rage-filled youth? Was Hillary Rodham Clinton sincere about joining the Marines, or is this assertion like that Bosnian sniper fire she hallucinated?

Embellishment is the order of the day, to a point where you begin to wonder if Brian Williams was less the exception than the rule; if it’s human instinct to aggrandize (and to start believing the aggrandizement); and if success on the scale that most of the presidential contenders have achieved involves especially fanciful myth making, also known as shamelessness.

But the lies aren’t all of the same size, shape and hue. Most of Carson’s fall into the category of gilding (or glooming) reality, of overdramatizing the humdrum, while Clinton and Jeb Bush sometimes play characters different from who they really are. She: “dead broke” upon leaving the White House. He: a political rebel prepared to disrupt the status quo.

Cruz outperforms either of them, a former college debate whiz who is practiced at instantaneously constructing an argument for an assigned viewpoint that may not be his own.

That skill surely came in handy when he ran for a Senate seat in 2012 and saw that the best lane available to him was marked Tea Party. He became the Tea Party incarnate, turning Washington into a four-letter word: a four-letter word, mind you, that he couldn’t wait to make his second home and use as a stage upon which to strut and preen.

His greatest distinction as a lawmaker thus far has been his readiness to pursue lost causes that draw attention from a news media that he supposedly loathes, and to skirmish with party colleagues in a way that similarly puts him front and center on TV and prompts headlines about him.

His storytelling is selective. He talks voluminously about his father’s arrival in Texas from Cuba, presenting a harrowing, inspiring immigration narrative that’s probably not the full truth and glides over many oddities and unanswered questions.

He talks less voluminously about his mother and about Canada, which is where she gave birth to him. She’d grown up in Delaware — not exactly the prairie — and gone to college at Rice University, which is sometimes referred to as the Harvard of the South. Not only that, she majored in mathematics. That was hardly the norm for a woman in the 1950s, and it suggests a certain sophistication, even progressiveness.

He emphatically recalls how his father’s embrace of Jesus Christ led him back to his mother — and to him — after his parents had separated.

He tends to skip over the part about his parents eventually divorcing nonetheless. It was his father’s second failed marriage. That detail doesn’t fit Cruz’s moralizing on the subject of holy matrimony. It doesn’t buttress his extravagant lamentations about the tradition-shattering, God-insulting unions of two men or two women.

But then his education and his station in life don’t exactly buttress the disdain he heaps on intellectuals and the affinity he claims with the hourly laborers of the world.

During the most recent debate, he twice disparaged the people in Washington who set monetary policy as haughty, disconnected “philosopher-kings.”

From such cunningly chosen, strategically deployed words, you’d never guess Cruz was known at Harvard Law School for a reluctance to “study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton or Yale,” according to a 2013 profile of Cruz in GQ by Jason Zengerle.

One of Cruz’s law-school roommates, Damon Watson, told Zengerle, “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”

Good thing Heidi Cruz got her graduate degree in business administration from Harvard. Or bad thing, depending on your view of marriage to Ted Cruz.

He’s big on American exceptionalism. He’s loquacious on American sovereignty. But after that all-night, 21-hour protest of Obamacare — you know, when he stood on the Senate floor and managed to quote country-western lyrics, muse about “Duck Dynasty” and read “Green Eggs and Ham” aloud — he was photographed being driven away in a BMW.

What a deluxe chariot for such a down-home guy, but how true to the disparities between his branding and his reality.

He has a pair of favorite cowboy boots, as anyone involved in a masquerade like his must. But they’re not the usual leather. They’re black ostrich skin.

That actually surprises me. I would have expected peacock feathers.

Frank Bruni is a columnist for The New York Times.