As I read Prof. Dan Hopkins' post in the Monkey Cage about the "myth" of political messaging I was priming myself to prattle on with devilish advocacy about Jefferson's successful huckstering of Everyman republicanism and Lincoln's brilliant manipulation of mid-war abolitionism and Wilson's jarringly seductive jingoism (as well as George W. Bush's) and FDR's--well, pretty much everything about his many terms--and even Obama's belated but powerful shifting of public opinion vis-à-vis 2011's Default Affair, until I arrived at Hopkins' last paragraph, which triggered some other thoughts:
Even if messaging doesn’t shape public opinion directly in the short-term, it might influence the outcome of policy debates precisely because politicians and their aides believe it to matter. Arguably, that’s precisely what we saw during the shutdown, as the belief among some GOP leaders in the efficacy of messaging increased their willingness to let the battle play out.
That, especially the first part of that, has to be what Ted Cruz is thinking: the awesomeness of his messaging skills will, in 2016, electrify the electorate and thus transport him to the White House. If voters are even half as mesmerized by Cruz as he is so obviously mesmerized by himself, then he's a shoo-in, right?
Huey Long harbored the same delusion--he never stood a chance against Roosevelt--as have many other demagogues, long since buried and forgotten. Ted Cruz? He's an educated man, and somewhere in his education he had to learn that, in American politics, insufferably negative blowhards never rise to the very top. Incompetents can make it, the corrupt can make it, and a few inepts who happened to be in the right job at the right time have made it. But the blackhearted don't.
From this point on Cruz can change course and market himself as some sort of happy warrior for populist anger, but those two phenomena would remain in conflict, and the second would drag the first down. And that, too, Cruz simply has to know as an educated man.
Which leaves me perpetually puzzled. Just what is he thinking? There must be something else. But of course it might only be as "brilliant" as his shutdown plan, which is to say, so colossally stupid, we just can't guess.