4 Reasons Why Egomaniac Ted Cruz Will Never Become President

Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz desperately wants to be president of the United States. When he speaks, he takes on a serious tone in an effort to prove he’s sincere – much like the actors in Excedrin commercials talking directly to the camera and struggling to appear strained yet earnest. While he enjoys a rabid evangelical following, he doesn’t have enough national or congressional support, even among his own caucus, to make it to the White House. In fact, I predict that in time, he’ll fade into the same abyss of irrelevance as former Florida congressman Allen West.

Here are the reasons in no particular order:

1. Cruz is unbearably arrogant and Senate Republicans despise him. These are the folks who know and work with him. He’s been branded a “wacko bird” by one Senate colleague and a “jackass” by the former Speaker of the House John Boehner.

Cruz isn’t bothered by this at all. After Boehner called Cruz a jackass, his campaign quoted him as saying, “I will wear it as a badge of honor because I refuse to join their club.”

According to a November 2015 article in The Washington Post, the list of GOP politicians and operatives willing to take open shots at Cruz is long: Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, former House speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio), Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), fellow Texas Sen. John Cornyn, Sen. John Thune (S.D.), former senator Tom Coburn (Okla.) — and on and on.

“There’s not a lot of love lost for the guy,” said Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). “And it’s not what he’s trying to accomplish or what he says he’s trying to accomplish that bothers people,” Holmes added. “It’s that he’s consistently sacrificed the mutual goals of many for his personal enhancement.”

2.Senate Republicans aren’t the only people who’ve expressed a strong dislike for the junior senator from Texas. Cruz’s college roommate, screenwriter Craig Mazin, said, “I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone. I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.”

Erik Leitch, who attended Butler College with Cruz, said, “It was my distinct impression that Ted had nothing to learn from anyone else.” Leitch said he remembers Cruz as someone who wanted to argue over anything or nothing, just for the exercise of arguing. “The only point of Ted talking to you was to convince you of the rightness of his views.”

The Daily Beast reported that other fellow classmates, who wished to remain anonymous, described Cruz with words like “abrasive,” “intense,” “strident,” “crank,” and “arrogant.” Four classmates independently offered the word “creepy,” with some pointing to Cruz’s habit of donning a paisley bathrobe and walking to the opposite end of their dorm’s hallway where the female students lived. Mazin said, “I would end up fielding the [girls’] complaints: ‘Could you please keep your roommate out of our hallway?'”

3. There’s also The Brutalism of Ted Cruz – a headline from a recent article in the New York Times.

The Times article begins with:

“In 1997, Michael Wayne Haley was arrested after stealing a calculator from Walmart. This was a crime that merited a maximum two-year prison term. But prosecutors incorrectly applied a habitual offender law. Neither the judge nor the defense lawyer caught the error and Haley was sentenced to 16 years.

Eventually, the mistake came to light and Haley tried to fix it. Ted Cruz was solicitor general of Texas at the time. Instead of just letting Haley go for time served, Cruz took the case to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison for the full 16 years.”

The article goes on to explain that Cruz has the support of evangelicals yet his message lacks the same compassion other candidates display while courting voters, such as emphasizing the need to lend a helping hand to those less fortunate.

“But Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them. When he is speaking in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he sets is jarring.”

Last but not least – and not without delicious irony:

4. The subject of Cruz’s eligibility is now in question.

Another article in The Washington Post makes the case that Cruz is not eligible to be president or vice president saying:

“The Constitution provides that “No person except a natural born Citizen . . . shall be eligible to the Office of President.” The concept of “natural born” comes from common law, and it is that law the Supreme Court has said we must turn to for the concept’s definition. On this subject, common law is clear and unambiguous. The 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone, the preeminent authority on it, declared natural-born citizens are “such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England,” while aliens are “such as are born out of it.” The key to this division is the assumption of allegiance to one’s country of birth. The Americans who drafted the Constitution adopted this principle for the United States. James Madison, known as the “father of the Constitution,” stated, “It is an established maxim that birth is a criterion of allegiance. . . . [And] place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States.”

Cruz is, of course, a U.S. citizen. As he was born in Canada, he is not natural-born. His mother, however, is an American, and Congress has provided by statute for the naturalization of children born abroad to citizens. Because of the senator’s parentage, he did not have to follow the lengthy naturalization process that aliens without American parents must undergo. Instead, Cruz was naturalized at birth.”

The Guardian claims his eligibility is “murky” and “unsettled.”

The article cites how Donald Trump’s recent attacks on Cruz has cast doubts and, “In doing so he has referred to the work and words of Laurence Tribe, perhaps the most respected liberal law professor in the country.”

Tribe concluded, “There is no single, settled answer. And our supreme court has never addressed the issue.”

Whether it’s former classmates or current colleagues, people who know Ted Cruz personally don’t like Ted Cruz. There’s no doubt that if Cruz’s poll numbers start to spike, he’ll face real birther backlash – and the odds aren’t in his favor.

The bottom line is that Cruz is no more a threat to any other GOP candidate than Roseanne Barr is. He’s good for some sound bites, and his small core of loyal followers are loud enough to keep him in the public conversation until the actual Republican presidential candidate is declared. Cruz will remain in the Senate until 2018 and will most likely be voted out whereupon he’ll write pretentious books, become an arrogant talking head on Fox, and earn oodles and oodles of money from the conservative machine.

Like Kimberley A. Johnson on Facebook HERE, follow her HERE. Twitter: @authorkimberley

A quick thanks to Kerri Castellini. Learn more here.

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