Ted Cruz, Outsider?

By Andrew Rosenthal, NYT
October 5, 2015 2:20 pm

Presidential candidates’ strategies can sometimes be hard to understand, especially when those candidates are not exactly killing it in the polls.

Take Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. According to The Hill, his campaign is currently running on two big ideas (to use that term rather loosely). One is that Mr. Cruz does not actually want to be leading right now. The other is that, despite his membership in the most insider elite group imaginable, the United States Senate, Mr. Cruz is an outsider to Washington.

This is the year, of course, in which pretty much everyone running for the Republican presidential nomination wants to act like an outsider, under the theory that the best thing the country can do right now is to elect a president without any political experience.

Mr. Cruz and his team, according to a spokesman, Rick Tyler, “don’t want to break out” of the pack of Republican candidates right now, which is lucky, since that does not seem to be happening anyway. Offering a garbled comparison between the presidential race and the college basketball March Madness brackets, Mr. Tyler said, “We are moving slow and steady.”

(More here.)