How Ted Cruz Is Running The Republican Table

In the spring of 2011, I heard about a dazzling young conservative, the former solicitor general of Texas, who was running for a soon-to-be-open U.S. Senate seat. Brilliant and charismatic, he was a Princeton and Harvard Law graduate who seemed to relish rubbing that pedigree in the faces of Ivy League liberals who couldn’t fathom why he wasn’t “one of them.” But Ted Cruz would never be “one of them,” and that gave him the makings of a conservative superstar.

So I invited this political unknown with negligible poll numbers to appear as a guest on my national radio show. One of the first — and most dynamic — candidates to emerge from the then-nascent Tea Party movement, Mr. Cruz spiritedly championed limited government, fiscal responsibility and economic freedom. When I asked if we could trust him to stay true to those principles, he replied unequivocally, “I give you my word. I will fight with everything I have for them and for this great country.”

And he did. He waged so many lonely battles against President Obama, the left, the media and many in his own party — over Obamacare, the debt ceiling, taxes, Mr. Obama’s executive orders, gutting of the military and global retrenchment — that I began tweeting, “Must Ted Cruz do everything?”

He was the original outsider.

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