I don’t think pussy is an abbreviation of pussyfooting at all. Pusillanimous means cowardly. This is exactly what the term means. If one intends to say pussyfooting they say pussyfooting, it doesn’t get shortened.
Pussyfooting is beating around the bush, not getting to the point. Being a pussy is far more cowardly than that. The term pussy has been in the “slang” vernacular for a long time, it is a well understood term that most people (wrongly) immediately equate with female genitalia.
Nope. Here is a little history of the word pussy. It almost certainly started likening a woman to a pussycat in the 19th century or earlier. The phrase pussyfooting around, which appears around 1900, implied being timid, afraid, like a cat. No sense of woman there.
Pussy was in use in theater circles by the late 1940’s to mean a homosexual male. Interesting how these terms morph from women to homosexual males, much like a faggot.
The term for female private parts came on a separate path when it morphed from the word, poesboekkie to the Dutch poes, which is linked to the word puss.
In this Cruz’s case, the use of the word pussy is the most correctly used as a term for a pussyfooter and at the extreme, maybe as a term for a faggot. No sense of female private parts here and no obscene use here.