An excerpt for an NPR interview. It sounds like Cruz WAS arrogant in his college years:
INSKEEP: You write that as a grown-up, you unlearned some of those lessons, particularly in the 2000 presidential campaign when you worked for George W. Bush.
CRUZ: Yes.
INSKEEP: That you had been hoping for some senior position in the administration, you didn’t get it because you feel that you annoyed a lot of people.
Have you ended up — have you ended up more like the kid you were at the beginning, when you were unpopular?
CRUZ: Well Steve, you’re right that I described going to Bush campaign. So when I was in my late 20s, I left my job, packed up everything I owned and moved to Austin to join the 2000 Bush campaign....
But I do describe how, on the campaign, I found myself slipping into old habits. And I had been very successful — I’d been very successful at school, I had gone to top schools, which no one in my family ever had. I had clerked on the Supreme Court, I had a successful law practice. And when I was on the Bush campaign, I was very cocky, and I paid a price for that.
I desperately wanted to have a senior position in the administration. But I had burned a lot of bridges on the campaign, and so that was not in the offing. And one of the things I describe in the book is how I went through a very difficult year the first year of the Bush administration, where I had worked incredibly hard.
But it’s interesting. Heidi, I mentioned my wife. You know, a lot of times your spouse sees things about you that you don’t necessarily see. Heidi is convinced that my personality changed in a very fundamental way in that period. And one of the things I describe in the book, I needed to get my teeth kicked in. I needed not to be as cocky as I had been on the campaign....
And I point out if I had gotten what I wanted, if I had gone to a senior White House position in the Bush administration, two things would have happened. Number one, I undoubtedly would have been ensnared in some of the many mistakes of the Bush administration, and I chronicle quite a few of those in the book where the administration deviated from the conservative principles that the president had campaigned on. But number two, if I had gotten that, I never would have been elected to the United States Senate.
You know, one of the great things about our democratic process, the way you get elected, particularly in a grassroots campaign like the one that I ran in Texas and the run — the one that I’m running now nationally is you go to hundreds of IHOPs and Denny’s and VFW halls and you sit down and talk with people. And here’s a real simple rule of thumb. If you’re an arrogant little snot, you ain’t going to win because the people you’re talking to are the salt of the Earth. They’re truck drivers, they’re plumbers, they’re schoolteachers, they’re working men and women.
And what we saw when I ran for Senate in Texas, what we’re seeing on the ground in Iowa, in New Hampshire and South Carolina is that old Reagan coalition coming together. People — we’re seeing conservatives and libertarians and evangelicals and young people and Hispanics and African-Americans and Jewish voters and women and Reagan Democrats. And I think — as I point out in the book, I think God knew what he was doing when he allowed me to get my teeth kicked in on the Bush campaign and not achieve the success that I so badly wanted because I need to learn some lessons.
INSKEEP: Do you think you’re less cocky now?
CRUZ: Absolutely. And it’s interesting, because the attacks that are leveled in Washington, they go through almost an Alice in Wonderland, through the looking glass, inversion.
INSKEEP: You say you don’t recognize yourself when people describe you as arrogant or whatever they may say?
CRUZ: Indeed, what they’re doing often, is projecting their own conduct.....
Well, he was smarter than everyone else; but he was young and eventually learned his lessons well.
Rare for anyone much less a politician to admit that sort of thing. Cruz is exceptional in a lot of ways.