Thoughts on Cruz... ah, in general find the antics of these demagogues and charlatans annoying and unwatchable - I'll say simply that Cruz and those like him are a manifestation of an element of the right that, for whatever reason - stupidity, arrogance, self-righteousness, I dunno - an element who can't seem to grasp that outrage and contempt for the left is not a winning formula in a country where the media overwhelmingly supports the other side - I actually tend to doubt it'd be a winning formula regardless of media bias - extremes, no matter what ideology they serve, are fundamentally undemocratic as far as I'm concerned - but certainly in a country where the media is overtly sympathetic to the left it's delusional to think right wing outrage, which often devolves into farcical behavior and the promoting of outlandish candidates, is going to move the country in a positive direction or win you a governable majority in a general election and the angry extremism evinced along the way will only in the end prove self-defeating - indeed, much of Obama's political guile is based on a belief that the angrier the right gets the better off he is.
[and don't talk to me about 2010 - firstly, Obama's method is better suited to presidential elections when the constituents he depends on are fully engaged - that'd be the poor, minorities, youth, women, unions and most importantly the media - and secondly, the fact the GOP should have taken both house and senate and didn't proves the point: the senate didn't go their way because the greater voting sample of a senate campaign much more closely resembles the dynamics of a presidential election than the limited voter sample you see in house campaigns - it's much easier for outrage to pay dividends when broad appeal factors less in outcomes]
