Ted Cruz admits that he’s cocky — or at least that he was before being humbled in the “backwaters” of the Bush administration. The experience forced the ultra-ambitious Texan to alter his personal and political trajectories, changes that he says benefited him.
The Texas senator has long been known for his pugnacity and for being deeply reviled by leaders on both sides of the aisle. A former college roommate of his once said, “One thing Ted Cruz is really good at: uniting people who otherwise disagree about everything else in a total hatred of Ted Cruz.”
At the same time, he has a reputation as a brilliant debater and a hardcore conservative, traits that have endeared him to many Republican voters. Now in his second term in the Senate and having finished as the runner-up in the 2016 GOP presidential primary, Cruz acknowledges that he began politics as an arrogant overachiever.
“On the Bush campaign, as a kid, I was a pretty cocky kid,” Cruz said in a wide-ranging interview with the Washington Examiner in his office in the Russell Senate Office Building.
After Harvard Law School, he left the more lucrative path of a legal career to spend a year and a half on then-Gov. George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign in 2000 instead. Besides rubbing shoulders with the upper echelons of the Republican Party, he also met his wife on the campaign trail. She went on to become an economic director in Bush’s National Security Council, but Cruz was not rewarded with a high-profile role in the White House as he had hoped and expected. Instead, he was placed at the Federal Trade Commission working on policy — far away from the spotlight and action that he craved. Cruz said that being a “cocky know-it-all” didn’t produce success.
He was “very, very frustrated” at the time. “I think it changed my personality — and in a very fundamental way,” Cruz said.
“Without going through that experience, I think there’s no way I could have been elected to the Senate,” he said.
Cruz said he “needed to get [his] teeth kicked in” and learn that some of “God’s greatest gifts are in unanswered prayers.”
His at times abrasive, overconfident persona has rubbed people the wrong way in more recent times too. Cruz was at one point so unpopular on Capitol Hill that his colleague Sen. Lindsey Graham in 2016 joked that “if you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”
Cruz, though, has succeeded in building bridges with President Trump and key senators while moving toward the center of the party in the past few years.
In 2018, Graham reversed himself and said: “I like Ted Cruz. I wouldn’t have said that two years ago … I think he’s got unlimited talent.”
After working on Bush’s presidential campaign, Cruz said, he desperately wanted to be like the character portrayed by Michael J. Fox in the movie The American President, where he would be “the young, principled idealist standing in the Oval Office” telling the president what needed to be done.
That dream of his didn’t materialize at the time, but soon thereafter, he was invited to return to his home state of Texas to become solicitor general from 2003 to 2008. This opportunity eventually allowed him to build up his political credentials to run for office himself. Back in Texas, he spent a lot of time in people’s living rooms understanding how grassroots movements are built, which was essential to his unexpected, come-from-behind victory during the 2012 Republican Senate primary in Texas.
When asked about his mental state now, Cruz said that he “tends to be a pretty relaxed person” who doesn’t have a lot of things outside of politics that make him anxious. Instead, he enjoys playing basketball every week and watching films.
Cruz says he spends most of his downtime with his family. He admits that as a parent, he does naturally have worries about his girls, who are in third grade and sixth grade, but otherwise, he doesn’t have much that stresses him out.
