Sen. Ted Cruz is like Ronald Reagan without the charm. And the achievable bold ideas. And the executive governing experience. And the savvy aides to help carry out his vision.
And that's why the first candidate to throw his Stetson in the ring for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination won't be first at the end.
The Texas senator would like to inherit the evangelical voters who embraced Jimmy Carter in 1976, threw him over for Reagan in 1980 and helped elected George W. Bush in 2000.
After all, it was no coincidence that Cruz launched his campaign last week at Liberty University, which was founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, the man who started the Moral Majority organization that attempted to mobilize right-wing Christians in the 1980s as a political force.
And it was why he declared that "God's blessing has been on America from the very beginning of this nation, and I believe God isn't done with Americans." It sounded sort of Reaganesque, but then Cruz had never starred in "King's Row," been the national spokesman for General Electric and delivered the 1964 speech that ignited the modern conservative movement.
Today, the 30-year-old evangelicals who voted for Reagan in 1980 are 65. They've raised children and suffered career ups and downs, seen their retirement accounts swell, then plummet. They've heard campaign promises made and broken. They've worked in businesses where agreements are hammered out but now live in an era where no one can agree on anything in hyperpartisan Washington, D.C.
So when Cruz asks them to imagine a United States without an Internal Revenue Service, without abortion rights and without Obamacare, they just roll their eyes.
Oh, they can imagine it, just like they imagine what they would do if they won the lottery. No IRS? No taxes we'll owe? No millions of aborted babies, one of whom might one day find a cure for cancer? No Obamacare, which caused our insurance rates to skyrocket and our benefits to fall?
It's true that many Republican voters -- the 65-year-old evangelicals and the 30-year-old millennials -- would love to repudiate most everything the last six years have stood for: higher taxes, more regulation, less transparent government, same-sex marriage, illegal immigration and a feckless foreign policy. But the same voters also would settle for tax reform, for a heart-driven drop in the abortion rate and for a Supreme Court decision that would weaken Obamacare so much it would have to be abandoned or rethought.
The Ted Cruz the Republican electorate has seen so far, if it's the real Cruz, doesn't look like someone it wants to elect. Potential voters saw a pander bear in his presidential kickoff announcement, know him from being blamed -- unfairly or not -- for shutting down the government in 2013, heard his endless rants against illegal immigrants, Obamacare and the Iran nuclear deal, and think he looks vaguely like that Joseph McCarthy guy they read about in the history books (who apparently wasn't a good guy, though they don't know why).
But the senator from Texas has said all that's not really him, explaining to a recent Iowa audience that he actually would be like Reagan in pushing for limited government but taking what he could get.
"If they offer you half a loaf, you take it," Cruz said, "and then come back for more."
Indeed, the candidate that Democrats and Big Media have left Scott Walker to demonize is no lightweight.
Educated at Princeton and Harvard universities, Cruz is a constitutional scholar (as Obama was described in the past), was the youngest solicitor general in the United States, the first Hispanic to clerk for the chief justice of the United States and is, according to liberal former professor Alan Dershowitz, "off-the-charts brilliant."
Plus, he is no more right of center than Obama was left of center when he ran for president in 2008. And he would have the same number of years of experience in the Senate as Obama at his election.
But Cruz, at least the one before voters in his first week as a candidate, seems more likely to be elected president of his party's right wing.
A potential winning candidate, instead, would be somebody ideologically between the Texas senator and another sure-loser centrist candidate like Sen. John McCain or former Gov. Mitt Romney, someone who is conservative, focused on the big picture, and can appeal to both the party base and to a broad range of voters.