US Election 2016: Republicans hoping for Ted Cruz over Donald Trump should be careful what they wish for

On paper, Cruz should be just the man to restore sanity to the GOP, but a traditional Republican he most certainly is not

Ted Cruz, speaks at the Colorado Republican State Convention, in Colorado Springs (AP)

It wasn’t delirium exactly, but many Republicans felt something close to it last week when voters in Wisconsin rebuked Donald Trump and offered real hope that his rambunctious lunge for the party’s nomination might yet be repelled. But there was also a problem. The cavalry in this case was a certain Senator Ted Cruz from Texas. Were they trading one nightmare for another?

To be clear, even after his Tuesday loss, Mr Trump is still better positioned than anyone to become the party’s nominee. But the chances are increased that he won’t get the number of delegates he needs before the party convention in July, which would trigger a possible floor fight over who to choose. In that instance, Mr Cruz would be the most obvious alternative.

On paper, Mr Cruz should be just the man to restore sanity. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard, he climbed the political pole in the most of traditional of ways. First by clerking in the Supreme Court and also working for George W Bush, both in his administration and on his first election campaign; then, before winning his Senate seat in 2012, by serving as the Solicitor General of Texas. He is also the son of Cuban immigrants, surely a boon for a party desperate to appeal to the Hispanic vote.

But a traditional Republican he most certainly is not. Like a tent preacher of the Old West, Mr Cruz oozes biblical piety and sanctimony. It’s a style that has opened him to ridicule from Mr Trump, who contends that Mr Cruz is a peddler of untruths. “He is Lyin’ Ted,” Mr Trump told 17,000 fans at a rally last week, “but you have to spell it right. It’s ‘L-Y-I-N apostrophe. Lyin’ Ted. The bible held high, he puts it down and then he lies.”

His other scripture is the US constitution. As a schoolboy, Mr Cruz could recite it from memory, and today still asserts that the founding fathers’ creed, and its assorted amendments, should find literal interpretation in the country’s laws, including those on gun ownership, a stance that delights his conservative followers but which could straightjacket him, should he become the Republican nominee.

The minute that Mr Cruz joined the Senate, the most exclusive club in the land, he made clear he wouldn’t play by its rules. Nor did he show any interest in making friends. It escapes the attention of no one that, even now, with Wisconsin surely the high watermark of his campaign so far, only two other Republican senators have actually endorsed him. That’s on account of one thing: there are very few people on Capitol Hill who can abide Senator Cruz.

Not forgotten is the all-out effort Mr Cruz made in 2013 to withhold funding for ObamaCare – the healthcare insurance system passed in 2010 – even to the point of forcing a shutdown of the entire government. Many of his own colleagues saw his antics as self-aggrandising and doomed to fail from the start. A “whacko bird”, Senator John McCain called him.

Also still festering is the offence caused when he turned on Senator Mitch McConnell last year, the leader of his own party in the US Senate, calling him a “liar” on the floor of the chamber in a spat over the future of the Export/Import Bank. Asked this week if he would take it back now, Mr Cruz demurred. “That ain't gonna happen,” he told CNN. “If the Washington lobbyists want see that happen they can hold their breath for a long, long time."

When Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, once a candidate himself, became the second Republican in the Senate to formerly endorse Mr Cruz, he likened his decision to making a choice between “being shot or poisoned.” Enthusiastic, he was not. But the realisation that Mr Cruz is both a marginally better option than Mr Trump, and is the only person positioned to stop him is slowly dawning on the rest of the party. True, the hard conservatism of the Texan might doom the party’s chances of retaking the White House this year, but at least it might stand to fight another day. Nominating Trump might destroy the Grand Old Party entirely.

The Senator therefore also faces a dilemma. Does he take whatever love (and money) the establishment is now willing to give him and adapt and expand his platform, in hopes of broadening his appeal beyond his base of constitutional and evangelical purity? Does he become less of a firebrand?

Is he prepared, for instance, to forego his claim that there is “zero recorded warming” of the planet and his assertion that the climate change lobby is an attempt by “power-greedy politicians” to crimp American prosperity? Will he moderate his opposition to gay marriage and withdraw his pledge to outlaw abortion even in cases of rape or incest? Will he tone down his disdain for the gun control movement and stop saying things like: “You don’t get rid of the bad guys by getting rid of our guns. You get rid of the bad guys by using our guns.”

There is no evidence that he will do any of these things; arguably for good political reason. Any suggestion of his going soft now could destroy the brand he has so painstakingly created: Cruz versus the “Washington Cartel” and all who belong to it. Ask his supporters why they love him and they will tell you it’s because while most Tea Party candidates promised to tread an uncompromisingly conservative path in Washington they didn’t; however, he actually delivered. Mr Cruz recently put it this way: “The Lord tells us we shall know them by their fruits.”

Mr Cruz is expected to fare poorly in New York when it votes on 19 April, in part because he attacked Mr Trump several weeks ago for embodying “New York values”, as if it that were a terrible thing, though there are many in Middle America who surely think just that. But it is also because his extremist positions on social issues, and his sleeve-worn Christian zeal, simply won’t sit well in the state.

But there is plenty besides in the Cruz book of promises to give all but the most conservative of voters pause. He wants to eliminate the Internal Revenue Service and introduce a ten per cent flat tax, which, according to most economists, would explode the budget deficit. To beat Isis he envisages carpet bombing parts of Syria and Iraq. “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we are about to find out,” he commented. As for Syrian refugees, he would discriminate based on religion. “Those who are fleeing persecution should be resettled in the Middle East in majority Muslim countries,” he recently offered, while Christians “targeted for genocide” should be provided safe haven in the US. Oh, and this may sound familiar, he also wants a wall between the US and Mexico.

Mr Cruz, in other words, is an extremist too. Republicans who fear that nominating Mr Trump would wreak havoc on their party – and if he was to later win the White House, on the country and on the world – can be forgiven for feeling the pull of Mr Cruz as their last, best chance of salvation. But they had better be careful of what they wish for.