The 2016 GOP clown car

It's hard for Ted Cruz to be humble. Part of the challenge stems from his résumé, which the Texas senator wears like a sandwich board. There's the Princeton class ring that's always on his right hand and the crimson gown that, as a graduate of Harvard Law School, he donned when called upon to give a commencement speech earlier this year. (Cruz's fellow Harvard Law alums Barack Obama and Mitt Romney typically perform their graduation duties in whatever robes they're given.) Even Cruz's favorite footwear, a pair of black ostrich-skin cowboy boots, serves as an advertisement for his credentials and connections. "These are my argument boots," he told me one morning this summer as we rode the subway car beneath the Capitol to a vote on the Senate floor. "When I was Texas solicitor general, I did every argument in these boots. The one court that I was not willing to wear them in was the U.S. Supreme Court, and it was because my former boss and dear friend William Rehnquist was still chief justice. He and I were very close—he was a wonderful man—but he was very much a stickler for attire."
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[W]hat kept drawing my eye was a giant oil painting above the couch depicting Cruz as he delivered the first of his nine oral arguments before the Supreme Court. "I was 32 years old," he recalled. "It was abundantly clear we didn't have a prayer.... And I've always enjoyed the fact that as I'm sitting at my desk, I'm looking at a giant painting of me getting my rear end whipped 9-0."

He gazed at the wall. It is an unusual painting: From the artist's vantage point, we see three other courtroom artists, each also drawing Cruz—so the painting actually features not one but four images of young Cruz before the bench. "It is helpful," he explained to me, "for keeping one grounded."

For a party in the midst of some serious soul-searching, Cruz offers a simple, reassuring solution: Forget the blather about demographic tidal waves and pleas for modernization; all Republicans need to do is return to their small-government, anti-tax fundamentals. "I don't know a conservative who didn't feel embarrassed voting in 2006 or 2008," Cruz told me—a remark that's sure to endear him even more to McCain. "I think the Republican Party lost its way. We didn't stand for the principles we're supposed to believe in."

Should he run for president, in 2016 or beyond, Cruz's strategy will be to superglue himself to the conservative base and hope it carries him to the GOP nomination. It's been tried over and over since Reagan—and it has failed every time. Just not enough wacko birds out there. Then again, the men who have tried it—from Pat Robertson in 1988 to Rick Santorum in 2012—possessed nowhere near Cruz's political acumen, not to mention his life story. Or, to put it the way Cruz himself might: None of them were Ted Cruz.