[Daktoria]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/us/po ... force.html

Mr. Cruz earned the nomination on Tuesday in a runoff election after more than a year of sweaty street campaigning, drawing national attention for beating Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the more experienced nominee of the Texas Republican establishment.

“I’d have predicted that he would be a professor, not a politician,” said Robert P. George, Mr. Cruz’s adviser at Princeton in the early 1990s. Professor George, a noted social conservative, said that Mr. Cruz stood out even among his Ivy League peers as “intellectually and morally serious,” writing his thesis on the separation of powers.

“But he’s certainly not a shrinking violet,” Mr. George quickly added in an interview Tuesday — to which, Mr. Dewhurst, a wealthy conservative who had the support of Gov. Rick Perry, can attest.

Mr. Cruz’s victory in November is all but assured in this heavily Republican state and marks a shift to the right in the already-conservative party here. Political elders and experts who have watched him during his time here as state solicitor general and on the campaign trail predict that he will be an intellectual force in the Congress on behalf of Constitutional limits on federal power. He is expected to join Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina and other Tea Party icons as an uncompromising irritant of mainstream Republicans and Democrats alike.

It helps, of course, that Mr. Cruz has the smooth good looks and practiced speech of a television host and is able to channel his knowledge into sound bites.

“He has the potential to be a national figure,” said Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University, noting Mr. Cruz’s intellect and oratorical skills.

“He’ll be a senator from the second-largest state in the nation,” Mr. Jones said, “and he’s very good on television, a perfectly designed politician for today’s 24-hour news cycle.”

Speaking to the Values Voters Summit in Washington in October, Mr. Cruz drew a standing ovation as he repeated the themes of the political and religious right, sometimes sounding more ideologue than intellectual. He called President Obama the country’s “most radical president,” railed against the “gay rights agenda” and warned against new threats to “religious liberty.” Within days, National Review anointed him “the next great conservative hope.”

Looks like we have a winner.