Smartest Guy in the Room, no matter what Room he walks into.
So says his former Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz.
Cruz is especially good in debate — he can see the traps being laid for him by dishonest correspondents. In the end, he manages not only to evade the trap, but to snare his dishonest correspondent in it instead.
To illustrate: a recent exchange with a left progressive news correspondent, who repeatedly tried to get Cruz to answer a question that basically boiled down to "are you an anti-gay bigot?"
Any direct Cruz denial would be spun by the MSM and the Huffington Posts of this world (et al.) as a confession that Cruz doesn't support gay marriage because he hates gays as a class — just by answering "No." But the correspondent already knows that Cruz couldn't answer "Yes."
I know this sort of verbal trap is illogical on its face; but that's how these folks operate. Cruz's denial would be headline news for days, a subversive misdirection of the substance of the issue. Cruz realized that just to answer such a question would be to "dignify" or "validate" it. So he took a pass.
Instead, he turn the question around, and flung it back into his correspondent's face: "Are you an anti-Christian bigot?"
Cruz is simply brilliant. I can't wait to see him on-stage during the GOP primary debates!!!