The passages that caught my eye are assessments of the Cruz strategies, and his foibles.
“Ted was not about responding to anything,” Mr. Panton said. “He would reframe the whole debate.”
“Nobody was better at setting traps,” said Austan D. Goolsbee, a Yale debater who became a leading economist for President Obama. He recalled Mr. Cruz’s attempts to control debates with carefully constructed arguments that always seemed to anticipate his opponents’ rebuttals.
But Mr. Goolsbee and other top debaters on the circuit who frequently beat Mr. Cruz discovered it was easy to get under his skin, especially with humor. “It would unravel him,” Mr. Goolsbee said.
“Ted was not about responding to anything,” Mr. Panton said. “He would reframe the whole debate.”
“Nobody was better at setting traps,” said Austan D. Goolsbee, a Yale debater who became a leading economist for President Obama. He recalled Mr. Cruz’s attempts to control debates with carefully constructed arguments that always seemed to anticipate his opponents’ rebuttals.
But Mr. Goolsbee and other top debaters on the circuit who frequently beat Mr. Cruz discovered it was easy to get under his skin, especially with humor. “It would unravel him,” Mr. Goolsbee said.
That inability to handle humor might be a good thing for Trump to note. I have actually never heard Cruz answer a question specifically and simply. He automatically veers off into his talking points and, depended on the quality of the asker, he gets pulled back, but most times just talks till he runs out the clock. It was the first thing I noticed about him when I was trying to figure what he stood for from his own words in real time.