No, I don’t quite feel sorry for Ted Cruz. But it’s rough, isn’t it? Apparently nobody likes him. Former House Speaker John Boehner, when asked by the Stanford Daily about the likelihood of Republicans uniting behind Cruz in a last-ditch effort to stop Donald Trump from taking the GOP nomination, called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh.”
“I have Democrat friends and Republican friends,” the stalwart Republican said. “I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a b**** in my life.”
Then, of course, the lyin’ liberal media just had to reach out to Satan’s people for reaction.
“Having a conservative Christian likened to Lucifer — one who opposes equal rights for same sex-couples and promotes the ability to deny services to any with different values—we Satanists see as besmirching the positive, heroic aspects of that character as portrayed by Milton in his epic Paradise Lost,” Magus Peter Howard Gilmore, the high priest of the Church of Satan, said in a statement.
Oooh, burn.
But being rejected by Theistic Satanists couldn’t have hurt more than the mean tweets Cruz has had to endure from his freshman college roommate, Craig Mazin, who grew up to be a film director and screenwriter with some dubious credits (Scary Movie 3, the last two Hangover movies).
To hear Mazin tell it — and he’s been telling it since 2012, when he observed that his former roomie was about to be elected to the Senate — Cruz was universally disliked while he was at Princeton. To the extent that Mazin got invited to “the senior parties . . . OUT OF PITY.”
“I have plenty of problems with his politics, but truthfully . . . 99 percent of why I hate him is just his personality,” Mazin said on the Scriptnotes podcast he co-hosts with fellow screenwriter John August in October 2013. “If he agreed with me on every issue, I would hate him only one percent less.”
Mazin’s Twitter feed — he’s @clmazin if you’re interested—is a gold mine for anyone looking to affirm their sense of Cruz as a smug, delusional and arrogrant twit. And it’s lent a certain credence by Mazin’s one-time proximity to the candidate. Mazin’s feed has pretty much been taken over by people asking him questions about Cruz (“How many hours per day was Ted praying or reading the Bible?” someone with the Twitter handle bevtex asks. “I observed a total of zero hours,” Mazin answers. “Was there ever a moment of levity between you and Cruz? A moment when you laughed at something together, agreed on a small thing?” asks another. “No,” Mazin responds.) or attacking him for being a left-wing Hollywood Jewish fella. (Yep, they still do that.)
Now, let’s understand the very fact that Mazin is still firing rounds into the Twittersphere is evidence that Ted Cruz is not the worst human being in the world, much less Lucifer in the flesh. I’m not sure the devil would stand for this abuse. A real super-villain would just whisper in a henchman’s ear and have Mazin and his feed deleted.
Cruz might be guilty of trying to manipulate voters—he might be willing to dissemble, spin and scare his way to the presidency — but he’s probably not going to do anything that would endanger his long-term political viability. After all, in political terms, he’s a young man. And if he really believes that he’s supposed to be president, he’ll have other chances.
Despite what you might see on House of Cards — despite what some ravers say about the Clintons—murder isn’t that effective a political tool. And while there’s plenty of evidence that Cruz is a genuinely unlikable person who is widely despised by members of Congress and old classmates, so what? Politics attracts odd and emotionally needy people — it’s no wonder so many of them seem so completely disconnected from the way most of us live.
With certain notable exceptions, I find most of the people who are drawn to politics a little odd and icky. I do not think I’d particularly like to have any of the current choices over to the house for dinner, though Trump would probably be the most fun. (Hillary wouldn’t do anything untoward, but I’m not sure Bernie Sanders is completely housebroken. I can see him buttonholing the other guests, waving pamphlets and petitions.)
And I really can’t get over the image of an 18-year-old Cruz strolling down his co-ed dorm’s hallway in a paisley bathrobe. (Mazin told The Daily Beast he had to deal with the girls’ complaints: “Could you please keep your roommate out of our hallway?”) Or the YouTube video of a young Cruz performing in a school production of The Crucible, throwing up his arms and squealing, “Why am I being persecuted?”
Things have changed. Cruz is of a generation that is a lot more documented than previous generations; in the coming years candidates are going to have to put up with people mining their old Facebook and Snapchat accounts for oppo research. I suspect there will be plenty of occasions for schadenfreude in the near future.
And I’m OK with that. Because, by and large, these aren’t very nice people. They pretend to be nice because they need us to like them, or at least to vote for them, but most of them believe they are especially well equipped to be in charge. They take it as their due, and they’re more concerned with the acquisition and exercise of power than they are with making the lives of most Americans better. A certain cynicism is an inherent feature (not a bug) in contemporary American politics.
There are plenty of reasons to be glad Ted Cruz seems unlikely to be our next president. And none of them have anything to do with his personality. But I almost feel sorry for him. Almost.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected] and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.