Care to explain how it is 'fleeting'?
/johnny
The primaries make it fleeting. A small and regional (northeast, south) minority of Republicans and Democrats (in open primaries) do the primary weeding out of the field, and it happens faster than a stone drops. Newt (who as flawed as he was, at least held some semblance of limited government philosophy, however distorted) was ousted long before I had any say, and so was Fred Thompson. See even right now, Fox is doing the same to Cruz that it did to Thompson -- pretending he doesn't exist, barely even mentioning him in political discussions of Republican candidates.
I say "fleeting" because the opportunity to nominate Cruz will be gone before we know it, pissed away. The same way Romney and McCain got the nomination.
And we'll be in November of 2016, in the same place we were in 2012 and 2008: vote for more government either way.