Ted Cruz must be Texan for chutzpah.
The Texas Republican gave an interview to NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell the other day, during which he was asked about political dysfunction in Washington. Without a trace of irony, embarrassment or self-awareness, Cruz placed the blame for political dysfunction solely on Democrats.
I could be wrong, but in my reading of "chutzpah" there's at least an interpretive hint of probity, some element of self-honesty, even if that honesty is aggressively and offensively twisted. In Ted Cruz, I detect no such ethic. Not a dram of it. Comparisons of this unscrupulous rogue to Joe McCarthy abound for good reason: the Wisconsin viper no more believed his accusatory humbug than the malevolent Texan does; to both, uh, gentlemen, public service meant only career enhancement.
Some demagogues of lore--say, Boston's James Michael Curley--hold a warm place in my heart because they were not only insistently lovable, they actually tried now and then to accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Hence the demagogic deployment of argumentum ad populum. (In Curley's case his rhetorical attempts were occasionally made from jail. Now who couldn't love that?) Most demagogues, however, are of Cruz's banality of drivel, which is embraced as sincere only by the irreparably uninformed.
It was with no little surprise, then, that I found Ruth Marcus "galled" by Cruz's pretend chutzpah. Because that's precisely the reaction he hopes to instigate. If the commentariat were to dismiss his disingenuity with the absence of ceremonial despair it deserves, the Texas senator would be history--just like Joe McCarthy.