L8. I trust we all remember "hope and change"? We should.
It helped propel a previously unknown community organizer into the
White House, hence into our lives, as reorganizer-in-chief.

Ted Cruz, "the Republican new man of the moment," according to Fox
News' Chris Wallace, has his own gifts as a wordsmith: less sugary, more
to be compared with a boxing glove. In the runoff for U. S. senator
from the great state of Texas, the previously unknown Cruz whammed the
well-known David Dewhurst, talking hard-edge language that seemed right,
to many, for the necessities of the moment. Like Dr. Samuel Johnson, he
"talked for victory." Victory, it turned out, was what Cruz voters
yearned for after three years of imposition by the Obama administration,
as well as Congress, on their liberties and prosperity.

No more "clubs" filled with "career politicians" is Cruz's watchword.
"We need to kick in the doors of the club, ring down the shades, and
auction off the silverware," the former Supreme Court clerk and state
solicitor general declared during the campaign. Pretty vivid stuff. No
sugar, no trans fats.

Reverse populism, it might be called: populism less at ease with
government power than in the bad, old Huey Long days is hugely
disquieted at the notion that government seems to be taking over
everything. "There are twin worlds," he told Chris Wallace. "There is
the world of Washington and the Beltway, and then there is the rest of
the country." In that "rest of the country," people are looking at
Washington and saying, "What's wrong with you people?"

Or maybe not. Somebody elected Obama. Somebody keeps his poll ratings
elevated slightly over Mitt Romney's -- for now at least. The idea that
Americans, as a body, reject the impositions of government, hate our
counterproductive tax system and don't blame George W. Bush for every
present ill -- well, such an idea is bosh. Plenty of Americans welcome
the impositions of government, wish there were more and can't wait to
squeeze the rich like a dirty washrag. These folks are, by and large,
Obama's constituency, not Cruz's.

What Cruz offers is line-in-the-sand clarity concerning the ills of
the moment. He feeds on fed-upness. Which isn't, in the least, to call
him a demagogue -- a stirrer-up of popular emotions for political
profit. As I read Cruz -- who I expect to be my senator, the necessary
electoral formalities having been observed -- he's plain had it with the
corner-cuttings and obfuscations of the political fraternity. Four
years ago, we hoped for change. What happened? The kind of change we
actually got was merely a speed-up of existing trends toward costlier
and more obtrusive government.

As a smasher of idols, Cruz's gift is for the sharp, short, telling
blow that reveals the defects and deficiencies of the present product
being hawked in Washington. Quite a large number of good people,
actually, are similarly exercised about America's present career path.
Cruz, as it happens, speaks better and more passionately than most of
them. That would include David Dewhurst, a very good man and a very good
conservative: just not passionate by nature.

The needs of the hour seem to include passion -- conviction -- verve
-- zeal. Of which, Ted Cruz has a large supply. In a way, he's the same
pig-in-a-poke that Obama was: scant experience in government and high
ratings as an orator. Even Obama had a little more legislative
experience. What Cruz has that Obama, if he has it, never has displayed
is a sense of the possibilities inherent in human freedom.

Those possibilities electrify a senatorial candidate whose father, a
near penniless Cuban immigrant, came to America, dreaming of ... how to
put it? Dreaming of more than he had. His son connects with that dream
in a way in which the author of "Dreams of My Father" seems oblivious.

Barack Obama may be the most powerful man on earth and Ted Cruz a
mere senatorial candidate, but we'll see soon whose language truly
speaks to today's Americans.