I guess if you define lying scumbag ‘brilliant’ - then yes, he is a smart one. However, Cruz doesn’t have a single demographic locked up. Not one. Worse, in the general he will not get 10% of the independent vote.
I hear people say how brilliant Cruz is. This brilliant legal and constitutional scholar claims that he did not know he was a Canadian citizen for 43 years until the Dallas Morning News reported it in late 2013. It seems pretty sloppy to me that a candidate would already be visiting Iowa in preparation for running for President as he was at the time and not even know his own citizenship status. I can think of words to describe that but brilliant is not one of them.